2025-10-15-participant-context-config

Participant Context Configuration

Decision

We will implement a configuration system for participant contexts that allows for flexible and dynamic management of participant context.

Rationale

Currently, EDC configuration needs to be provided at boot time. This makes it hard to manage configuration properties that are related to a participant context. Since we are introducing the concept of a participant context, we need a way to provide and manage participant context specific configurations.

This will allow dynamic provisioning of participant contexts and their configurations without requiring a restart.

Approach

We will introduce three new SPI interfaces:

• ParticipantContextConfig
• ParticipantContextConfigStore
• ParticipantContextConfigService

The ParticipantContextConfig will be the participant context aware Config variant, and it will provide methods to get configuration properties for a specific participant context:

public interface ParticipantContextConfig {

    // Retrieve configuration value for a specific participant context and key
    String getString(String participantContextId, String key);
    
    ... // Additional methods for other data types
}

This will be an injectable component that can be use in extensions for loading participant context specific configuration at runtime.

The ParticipantContextConfigStore will store and retrieve participant context configurations.

public interface ParticipantContextConfigStore {

    void save(String participantContextId, Config config);

    Config get(String participantContextId);
}

This will be an @ExtensionPoint point with multiple implementations, e.g. in-memory, database, etc. We will provide a shim layer when running in a single participant context mode.

The ParticipantContextConfigService will provide higher level operations for managing participant context configurations.

public interface ParticipantContextConfigService {

    ServiceResult<Void> save(String participantContextId, Config config);

    ServiceResult<Config> get(String participantContextId);
}

The ParticipantContextConfigService will provide a higher level API for managing participant context configurations. It provides transactional boundaries and validation, and it could be used in a REST API for managing participant context configurations.

Validation

Currently, the validation is done at boot time. We will need to introduce a validation mechanism that can be used at runtime when saving participant context configurations. This could be done by reusing the existing validation mechanism of Validator and ValidatorResult as we do for JsonObject.