David thanks a lot.
I was hoping there was a clear path in doing this, but at least I found out
the cruel truth :)
We will probably use the same approach as you did on your portal. It seems
to be the most reliable.

I hesitated whether or not to post this question on this group, but I took
my chance. Sorry to spam the others, though I'm sure there are a lot in the
same situation.

Thank you again

On 12/14/06, Nebinger, David <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

 The liferay wiki/forum (I don't remember which) speaks generically about
extending Liferay components and, in the particulars, spoke of extending the
user object specifically.

However, you won't find a great deal of info explaining how to do this.

Basically (at least for the 4.1 series, I haven't dug into the 4.2 series
yet so the following statements might not apply) liferay is totally struts
based and the user info/login is highly integrated into the portal itself.
I'm sure there are good reasons for this as user login/validation is a core
part of the liferay portal itself and, if handled incorrectly, could
jeopardize the security of your portal implementation.

Liferay has on it's list of future releases a JSF-based portal, but I
don't know when they will actually release this and whether it is jsp or
facelets based, how modular it will be, etc.

Since they rely on spring for the integration, potentially you could
identify the portion of the app managing the login, extend and override it
by altering the spring bean mappings.

As a recommendation, however, I'd say roll a JAAS implementation to your
database (liferay already supports JAAS) as that would at least get you
through the login to separate database issue.  I did see that the 4.2series 
seems to have CAS support so, if you have a current CAS
infrastructure, this might be something you could use also.

As far as the custom login interface goes, I think you'd really need to be
able to justify it before endevouring on such an undertaking; trying to swap
out existing portal interface elements that are struts based with a
JSF-based implementation while maintaining the seamless integration of the
components will most likely prove to be quite a struggle.

If your only reasoning is to manage authentication via an alternate
source, it is definitely more work than what it is worth.

Our implementation of liferay here takes a much more simplified approach;
we left the liferay authentication stuff in place, added the liferay user id
to our own authentication system, and added appropriate pieces to ensure our
internally-developed portlets had the necessary access to our internal
authentication tokens.  While it complicates user maintenance for the sys
admins, it ensures that we can transparently upgrade the liferay portal w/o
having to rework our internal authentication processes.

For future reference, Laurentiu, you may get a better response for
liferay-specific issues from the liferay forums; but, as a forum user
myself, I know how frustrating it is to post questions there and see them go
unanswered/unaddressed, so I certainly can't blame you for trying here also.


-----Original Message-----
*From:* [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of *Laurentiu
Trica
*Sent:* Thursday, December 14, 2006 11:12 AM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* Custom login in Liferay portal?

Hi there

Can somebody help me?
I have to make a custom login on Liferay portal using JSF. Does anyone has
any ideas?
By custom login I mean logging against another database (not Liferay's
one) and without LDAP server.
Found something about a custom Authenticator. Where should I place that
class?
I crawled the web for this and nothing came out.

Thanks in advance.

--
Best regards,
Laurentiu




--
Best regards,
Laurentiu

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