Windows Authentication In A Web Application

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Tutorial Pages > Windows Authentication In A Web Application

Overview

This document describes the processes needed to Autenticate a user accessing your pages by using their windows username and password.

This will then also enable you to track users through the site, so for instance, if they press a button on the site to action an event, you'll be able to log who actioned the event.

The advantages of this are that:-

The user can use their windows username and password.
The httpsession variable is used so that the user only needs to login once.
The username is stored against the ip address, so that it will only need to be entered once for a machine.
A session will automatically expire when no new requests have been made for a set time.

You can download the tasks for this example from:- http://www.international-presence.com/wikidocs/samples/On_Demand_Windows_Login.xml

Once imported they should look like:-

http://www.international-presence.com/images/docs/userlogin/tasks.png

To embed the task, we just place the Check Login Sub Task before our normal ondemand task page as you can see below in Simple Task To Confirm Action.

It might be that all ondemand pages start from one single task, in which case we would place the "Check Login Sub Task" at the start of that task.

http://www.international-presence.com/images/docs/userlogin/embedded.png

If the username and password are valid, then the "Check Login Sub Task" task will return null, and so the calling task will continue.

We can see here (in the yellow box), the embedded "Check Login Sub Task" and a switch to continue if the ${response} variable is null.


Description of Tasks

Simple Task To Confirm Action is the example task that shows you how to use Check Login Sub Task in your ondemand tasks.

This task is our ondemand task, that contains the "Check Login Sub Task". As such it must be added to the OnDemand Queue:-

http://www.international-presence.com/images/docs/userlogin/ondemand.png

Instructions task explains how to configure the tasks.

Session Expiry is a queued task that querys the Demo.UserLogin table effectively expiring sessions unused for 20 minutes.

This task must be added to the Task Queue.

http://www.international-presence.com/images/docs/userlogin/queued.png

Check Login Sub Task calls Login and updates the users details in the Demo.USerLogin table.

Login querys the username and password against the system and either returns a null response or a login panel.

Check User Exists in LDAP performs an LDAP Query against your active directory to Query if the username exists.

http://www.international-presence.com/images/docs/userlogin/userlogin.png

In Use

Start the httpserver and go to http://localhost/task/newconfirmtask

The first time you should see the following:-

http://www.international-presence.com/images/docs/userlogin/pleaseenterausername.png

This will require a valid windows username and password combination:-

http://www.international-presence.com/images/docs/userlogin/pleaseenterapassword.png

If the password is incorrect then you will get the following:-

http://www.international-presence.com/images/docs/userlogin/usernamepasswordincorrect.png

The username is looked up via an LDAP Query, so if it does not exist you will see:-

http://www.international-presence.com/images/docs/userlogin/usernamenotfound.png

As the task validates that the http session is logged in, Once the user is logged in they will stay logged in.