Does Xerte Online Toolkit work with shibboleth?

Hi John
this is great stuff thanks very much for sharing this. We get far too many users and organisations simply using the software and asking for loads of free support without ever giving anything back. Obviously that's the nature of open source software and we don't really complain about that but it's great when people do play a pro-active role like you have with not only reporting issues but also solving those same issues and sharing details too. We often get enquiries about Shibboleth and other authentication integration so this is a great reference point for other looking to achieve the same and where to look to make any changes needed for their own implementations.
Thanks again!
Ron

Hi,

No problem. My reply was a bit long, but what the heck I figure that hopefully others should have enough information there to sort things out for their own situation.

I hear what you are saying about opensource projects. It is often taken for granted the time and effort people put into a project. I have no problem with reporting bugs I may have found in a piece of software, but it always seems better if I can provide a patch to fix it as well. Of course whether the developers accept the patch (or even the bug) is up to them!

In the case of Shibboleth it was something we really wanted to provide to our users, so a certain amount of time was spent on that feature. It was just a shame that we couldn't get the php-saml code working. A lack of time meant I couldn't look into that too far, but maybe others will have better luck. At least there is an alternative now I guess


John.

Hello John,

Congratulations on your work at setting up Shibboleth authentication - this looks really good.

I have just tried this on Xerte v 3.2 and unfortunately it seems changes to how the authentication method is set and also the login buttons means that this does not work on Xerte v3.2.

I don't suppose you have worked out an update to your method to get round these issues?

Brian

Oh that's a shame. However, this is a problem with locally modifying the source - it may well break at the next release! Unfortunately I haven't had time to look at 3.2 at all yet as I am very much tied up with other work. I had hoped to take a look at it this Summer, but cannot guarantee that at all. Sorry.

Hi John,

I think I am a step closer; the authentication method is now stored in the authetnication_method column of the sitedetails table in the MySQL database.

Having applied your changes already on our development server I added the following to allow Shibboleth to be selected as the authentication method
website_code/php/management/site.php
echo "<option value=\"Guest\">Guest</option>
<option value=\"Ldap\">Ldap</option>
<option value=\"Db\">Db</option>
<option value=\"Static\">Static</option>
<option value=\"Moodle\">Moodle</option>
<option value=\"Saml2\">Saml2</option>
+ <option value=\"Shibboleth\">Shibboleth</option>
</select>";

This allowed the updating authentication_method to Shibboleth within the management page and now the Login button appears minus the username and password fields as per your modifications.

However when I click login and then enter my credentials into the IdP I get passed back to the Xerte home page but I am not recognised as being signed in as I still see the login button. I have applied the Apache Location directives for /USER-FILES /print and /editor as per the default /secure Location set by the Shibboleth SP installation.

Any ideas what may be wrong here?

Brian

Not really without looking at the code. Sorry.