[Building Sakai] CASifying Sakai & ContainerLogin "blank page" Issue

[Duffy Gillman]

I believe this issue is resolved.  I had made the incorrect assumption  
that the sakai.properties property login.url should be used to direct  
the user to CAS.  This appears to be the basis of the error.  I'll  
update the list in the morning when I confirm a fix, but wanted to  
head off any well-meaning debugging or instructional diatribes.  (You  
were all poised at the ready to compose those, right? ;D)


-Duffy

------------------------------
Duffy Gillman
Sr. Software Engineer
rSmart





On Sep 8, 2009, at 3:29 PM, Duffy Gillman wrote:

> Hi All,
>
>    I'm in the process of CASifying Sakai and have run into some
> tension between Confluence documentation and the behavior of
> ContainerLogin.  If one uses the Sakai wiki documentation a user is
> dumped at a blank page after ContainerLogin completes the user login.
> I am curious whether other CAS implementers have run into the same
> issue and whether a common solution exists.
>
>    Presently two Confluence pages describe CASifying Sakai:
>
>   http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SAKDEV/CASifying+Sakai
>   http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/~steve.swinsburg/
> CASifying+Sakai
>
> In those pages a ServletFilter is placed in front of the sakai-login-
> tool/container path.  A login.url is set in sakai.properties which
> creates a login link in the portal.  That link directs the user to CAS
> with a service URL pointing back to sakai-login-tool/container.  At
> that point the filter validates the CAS ticket, then wraps the
> HttpServletRequest with a custom object which implements
> getRemoteUser() to provide the username under which CAS has validated
> the user.  The ContainerLogin Servlet then logs the user into Sakai
> using the UsageSessionService.login() method.
>
>    This is all well and good and works as described.  The problem is
> that the user progresses no further.  He/she is logged in, but
> receives a blank page.  ContainerLogin is written as a Helper tool.
> As such it presumes the user arrived at sakai-login-tool/container
> from a client tool and attempts to return the user to that client
> tool.  An example of this can be seen in the LoginTool servlet at the
> end of doGet().  In the CAS login case the user actually came from a
> standard HTML link and was not redirected from a client tool.  Thus
> ContainerLogin attempts to redirect the user to a blank URL.
>
>    It seems that the options to resolve this are the following:
>
> 1) Modify the portal to setup a redirect to ContainerLogin as a Helper
> tool (eg. set the requisite session variables before redirect),
>
> 2) Modify the portal to include the login logic and scrap the use of
> ContainerLogin, or
>
> 3) Modify ContainerLogin to redirect to a URL specified in
> sakai.properties
>
> Are there folks who have used this strategy to CASify Sakai?  If so,
> is anyone having success with the instructions as written or have you
> had to create some workaround for the "blank page" problem?  Did you
> use one of these solutions to resolve the "blank page" problem, or did
> you do something else entirely?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
>    Duffy
>
> ------------------------------
> Duffy Gillman
> Sr. Software Engineer
> duffy at rsmart.com
>
>
>
>
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