dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Jo Størset <storset@xxxxxxxxx>]

Den 7. nov. 2010 kl. 15.12 skrev Jason Pickering:

> I think the automated data marts is a good feature, and might fit for
> some users, but I can imagine situations where multiple actions might
> need to be take place. Such as execute the data mart, execute some
> report tables, export some data to CSV and save it in a certain place,
> conduct a data integrity check and save the results as HTML...etc etc.
> 
> I saw the commit from Jo on basic HTTP authentication. Jo, could you
> explain how and if this works?

From 2.0.5, Basic authentication should be done if you send the authorization header with the request, so there should be no need to do the cookie/forms login stuff from scripts.

I.e. curl -v -u user:password url

We can't serve up a 401 request unless you serve up the header, as we want the form based authentication to be the default (replying with a redirect).

With the next version of spring security (3.1), I think it will be easier to have multiple authentication configurations. I was hoping that we could then have Basic as the default for the path/to/dhis/api/ namespace then, and maybe slowly start providing more clearly defined api-services. If people have simple and clearly defined services they need, I can try to take a stab at implementing them as prototype service, there. It has to simple, though, as I don't have much time and don't know the domain model considerations that well.

I'm not completely sure if we really want to have basic as a default enabled for other urls. Basically I think we need to have this kind of stuff more generally configurable, but that is then a bigger task.. There is of course also the question of wether basic (and forms login) is acceptable for a web app without ssl, which people don't seem to use in the wild. I have been contemplating wether we should optionally support digest authentication (openROSA is considering making that a requirement for their mobile api [1]), but that is a headache when it comes to storing the passwords.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/openrosa-workgroup/browse_thread/thread/f7a431b7f50ddb3

Jo