do it. think it. blog it! ... a twisted world

Back to normal programming. No more infocard stuff here.

With a typical Access Manager deployment atop a webserver or appserver, there are many instances where apart from the Access Manager services deployed, one may deploy other applications on the same server instance and may need to "protect" them. The right way of going about it is to deploy a policy agent on the same server instance. I noticed that in some cases folks choose not to deploy an agent but "embed" code in every page of their webapp to check for the validity of the SSOToken issues by AM and enable access to thise pages that they need "protected".

Well, if all one needs is to protect a few URI's that reside on the same server instance as AM, one could also use a Servlet Filter to do the same without having to embed code in every page of their application to check for it. This is a simple SSO only method and not a replacement for a policy agent.

Here's what one needs to do to enable this.
Declare the [filter] element in your web application deployment descriptor. For Sun's Webserver it would be the default-web.xml file.

Map the filter to a servlet by defining a <filter-mapping> element in the deployment descriptor. This element maps a filter name to a servlet by name or by URL pattern.
Add the URL's you would like to "protect" to the url-pattern tag element.

Now compile the attached code, build a jar file and add it to your servers classpath.

for some reason I just cannot post code on this blog. No matter what I try, the code gets converted over to HTML. I did follow Pat's advise, but that didnt help. So I'm uploading the NNAgent.java file and providing you a link to download it instead of posting code as inline text

Restart your webserver.

• Try accessing the "protected" URL without authentication.
• Try accessing the "protected" URL with authentication.

NOTE: This is NOT a replacement for a Policy Agent. This is just an FYI/example of how one could achieve SSO only using a Filter.