Forum .LRN Q&A: Request processor modification

Posted by Raúl Morales Hidalgo on 07/20/05 02:03 PM

Hi there,

In order to implement one of our authentication methods here at UNED, we need to check for a cookie (sent by a different server) and do some actions depending of the contents of the cookie.

We did that in our old implementation (based on ACS 3.4) by modifying the request processor.

I'd like to Know if I can do it using the new callbacks to run our own modified core without having to modify the core package.

Any ideas? Is there another way if it can't be done using callbacks?

Thanks in advance.

2: Re: Request processor modification (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 07/21/05 08:40 AM

The way to go is add a callback hook in the RP where you'd enter the code for checking the contents of the cookie. This would not require a TIP, BUT....

I'm not sure how much overhead the callback hook provides to a normal site as it is called on every single request and I'm a little bit reluctant to see something like this in such a prominent position in the codebase, so a fork might be the better solution.

3: Re: Res: Request processor modification (response to 1)

Posted by Raúl Morales Hidalgo on 07/21/05 10:23 AM

Thanks Malte,

I hardly notice any performance leak on our implementation of ACS 3.4, in fact most of the times it only reads a cookie and does a couple of ifs, I mean, if the callback process itself isn't time consuming my guess is it won't be noticeable slower.

I will probably try it both ways and see which one works better :)

on a side note, Do you (or anybody else) know when/if that callback backport to OACS 5.1 will be available for download?