[Building Sakai] Accessing HTTP Attributes in Sakai

[Mark J. Norton]

Chuck:

The client (U. of Florida) tested the code I wrote based on your 
suggestion.  I was really hoping it would work, but sadly - complete 
failure.  I was after Shibboleth ID attributes, which should have been 
present in the ServletRequest.  I can only assume that the portal 
null'ed them all out.  Why does the portal do that, anyways?  There are 
legitimate reasons for wanting access to that information, such as this one.

Fortunately, UFL has a fall back position based on another approach I 
wrote for them (using connection pooling).  That worked well, but they 
still want a Shibboleth User Directory Provider. Are you (or anyone 
else) aware of a Shib UDP implementation?  Can you point me at the code?

- Mark Norton

On 12/26/2013 10:08 PM, Charles Severance wrote:
> Mark,
>
> I don't know if this helps, but I found myself stuck inside of Portlet 
> code unable to get a GET parameter in the Servlet request.  The 
> Portlet API works very hard to *not* give you access to the real 
> underlyingServlet request - but inside of Sakai, I made this work:
>
> ./basiclti-portlet/src/java/org/sakaiproject/portlets/IMSBLTIPortlet.java
>
> ...
> import javax.servlet.ServletRequest;
> import org.sakaiproject.thread_local.cover.ThreadLocalManager;
> ...
>     public final static String CURRENT_HTTP_REQUEST = 
> "org.sakaiproject.util.RequestFilter.http_request";
> ...
>             // Grab that underlying request to get a GET parameter
>             ServletRequest req = (ServletRequest) 
> ThreadLocalManager.get(CURRENT_HTTP_REQUEST);
>             String popupDone = req.getParameter("sakai.popup");
>
> Your mileage may vary - within Portlet UI View method so I knew 
> exactly where in the request lifecycle I would always be.  In library 
> code It might not be so clear where you are at in the request / 
> response cycle...  One call from a tool might work and a call from 
> Quartz will blow up with an NPE.   Caveat emptor.
>
> Good luck.
>
> /Chuck
>
>
> On Dec 26, 2013, at 9:08 AM, Mark J. Norton <markjnorton at earthlink.net 
> <mailto:markjnorton at earthlink.net>> wrote:
>
>> Following up on this, can someone confirm that the Sakai 
>> ContextSession object provides access to the current HTTP 
>> attributes?  
>> Thedocumentation<https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/kernel/trunk/api/src/main/java/org/sakaiproject/tool/api/ContextSession.java>is 
>> a bit sparse.  ContextSession.getAttribute() has the comment:
>>      Returns the object bound with the specified name in this session, or <code>null</code> if no object is bound under the name.
>> I just need to be sure that the "session" here is the HTTP session, 
>> rather than the Sakai session.
>>
>> - Mark
>

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