[Opensource] external authentication?

[larry hamel]

hi,

One of our projects has a "legacy" authentication system, a digest key retained by a stand-alone client and transmitted via http to the server with each call.

This "external" authentication system is different than the one used by expresso, so to integrate the two, I extracted a new method in LoginController.java to expose where the login information is saved to the persistent session.  The new method is called                 LoginController.setPersistentLoginAttributes(), and to use it, I employed and override on Controller.perform () in the following way:

    /**
     * overriding in order to use different authentication
     */
    public ActionForward perform(ActionMapping actionMapping,
                                 ActionForm form,
                                 HttpServletRequest request,
                                 HttpServletResponse response
                                 ) throws IOException, ServletException {
        String id = request.getParameter(Get.AUTH);

        if ( Get.isValidKey(id)) {
            // set a CurrentLogin item in session
            // so that expresso will honor our authentication

            AuthInfo info = Get.getInfo(id);

            PersistentSession session = new HTTPPersistentSession(request, response);
            String dbContext = StringUtil.notNull(request.getParameter("dbContext"));
            if (dbContext.length() == 0) {
                dbContext = DBConnection.DEFAULT_DB_CONTEXT_NAME;
            }

            try {
                LoginController.setPersistentLoginAttributes(
                        session, request, info.getLoginName(), "", info.getUid(), dbContext);
            } catch (ControllerException e) {
                throw new ServletException(e);
            }
        }

        return super.perform(actionMapping, form, request, response);
    }


In the sample, Get.xxx refers to the external authentication system.

Is there a better way to integrate an external authentication system?

thanks,

larry