#### SAMLv2 Hosted Affiliation Customization

A Hosted Affiliation contains a grouping of service providers. The affiliation is formed and maintained by an affiliation owner who chooses the member providers from already configured provider entities. The affiliation enables a user to federate amongst the group of associated sites. The chosen providers may invoke services either as a member of the affiliation, or individually as a provider. If services are invoked as an affiliation member, a service provider might issue an authentication request for a user on behalf of an affiliation. When authentication is secured, the user can achieve single sign-on with all members of the affiliation.

A hosted affiliation provider holds the metadata that defines the grouping of one or more provider entities that comprise the affiliation. It does not contain the configuration information for any providers (which is defined in a provider entity), only the configuration information for the affiliation itself. If there are several service providers and identity providers in the same circle of trust, use an affiliate entity to avoid having to generate different name identifiers for commonly shared services.

Hosted Affiliation contains the following attributes for customization:

- Meta Alias

- Members

- Cert Alias

##### Meta Alias

Specifies a `metaAlias` for the provider being configured. The `metaAlias` is used to locate the provider's entity identifier and the organization in which it is located. The value is a string equal to the realm or organization name (dependent on whether the SAML v2 Plug-in for Federation Services is installed in Federated Access Manager) coupled with a forward slash and the provider name. For example, `/suncorp/travelprovider`.

Caution – The names used in the `metaAlias` must not contain a `/`.

##### Members

A provider must be a member of a circle of trust, or it cannot participate in Liberty-based communications. The provider can belong to one or more affiliations. The selected provider must have the Affiliation Federation attribute enabled. Enter the meta alias of the provider in the New Value field and click Add.

##### Cert Alias

This attribute defines the certificate alias elements for the provider. `Singing` specifies the provider certificate alias used to find the correct signing certificate in the keystore. `Encryption` specifies the provider certificate alias used to find the correct encryption certificate in the keystore.