Windows Authentication In A Web Application
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.