Hi James, I was also trying to do the same thing, however, we are using JRun and we don't have any user 'roles'.
Specifically, I wanted the container to do the authorisation i.e if a user tried to access any pages after <blah blah>/admin/* then they would be redirected to the login page if they have not logged in. However, the application does not have any 'roles' as such. The user is authenticated by calling a stored procedure in the dbase. I tried to implement the j_security_check also but was having a tough time integrating it with the actionform etc. Do you have any ideas as to how I would do this given that I don't have any user roles in the application? I was going to add a 'user' object in the session and check on each page if it exists. If it doesn't then redirect the user back to the login page. I have set the session.setMaxInactiveInterval(72000); Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Jackie. -----Original Message----- From: James Adams [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, 23 February 2004 4:43 AM To: Struts Mailing List Subject: Re: How to create a "No Action" ActionForward I think Srikanth has hit the nail on the head, in that I am not fully utilizing what is already available with vanilla J2EE, namely security roles, authorization constraints, and error pages, all of which I can declare in the deployment descriptor of my web app. But I still want to use a Struts component for the authentication instead of a more traditional form-based authentication scheme. Let me outline below what is, I think, a much better approach and kindly ask for comments, as I'm not certain that this will work or if it's actually the smartest way to go. I would like to use a Struts Action class to handle my login form, instead of vanilla form-based authentication, i.e. "j_security_check", for two reasons: 1) form-based authentication is not very secure since it passes the user name and password across the network in clear text, and 2) I want to use a LDAP server (within my login Action class) to do the authentication, and this would not be possible using plain form-based authentication. So the plan is to have a form in my Login.jsp with the form's action being the login Action class. The login Action class will connect to the LDAP server and try to authenticate using the username and password supplied as form inputs. If the authentication succeeds then the user's session is set with the user's role (also retrieved from the LDAP server), and then the control is forwarded to the first "logged in" welcome page. If the authentication fails then the appropriate error message ("Login failed - try again") will be added to the ActionErrors and control is forwarded back to the login page, which will display the ActionError message via a <html:errors> tag, and allow the user to try again. In order to accomplish session authorization of a session for each *.jsp of the application I will declare a security constraint in the web.xml, like so: <security-constraint> <web-resource-collection> <web-resource-name> Restricted Pages </web-resource-name> <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern> </web-resource-collection> <auth-constraint> <role-name>admin</role-name> <role-name>customer</role-name> </auth-constraint> </security-constraint> With the above I will get automatic checking of the user's role by the container at each access of any *.jsp, and anyone accessing a *.jsp without an appropriate role set in their session will not be allowed to access the page. If the user is not in the appropriate role then I can forward to an error page by declaring an <error-page> in the deployment descriptor. The above authorization strategy takes care of what I was trying to accomplish with my SessionValidator Action class idea from before, which was to check for a "loggedIn" session attribute before allowing a user to continue with page processing. In fact it is even better, in that it allows the flexibility of allowing different roles and authorization of pages based on roles and not just on a single "loggedIn" flag. I am not sure how I will programmatically set the user's role in the login Action class execute() method. Is it as simple as just setting a session attribute named "role" ? Thanks in advance for your insight. -James __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
