intercepting form based login

[ittay]

Hello,

I'm using JBoss 3.2 bundled with Tomcat. I'm trying to intercept the form based login flow so I can do some pre and post processing. In particular, the post processing should have the information whether the login succeeded.

I've tried all sorts of things: having the form's action be to a servlet which forwards to j_security_check, and also using a Filter implementation. Nothing does the trick.

Please help,
Ittay

[jtvrab]

Hello, Were you ever successful in resolving this issue; I noticed you had o replies. I am trying to implement a j_security_check filter, too. I have web.xml configuration set up. My filter.int() method is called, but the Filter.doFilter() method is not called when the j_security_action runs. Any ideas? Thanks.

[vertigo]

No need for filters here. You can hack the "catalina.jar" file and edit its "Authenticators.properties" file. Replace the line that states the class that intercepts any form submitted to "j_security_check". Ex:

FORM=com.xxxxx.MyOwnFormAuthenticator

This class will be created by extending the original "org.apache.catalina.authenticator.FormAuthenticator" class (it's easy). You can override its methods to, say, add session variables after the login succeded.

See ya.

[draftdog]

there currently is no clean way of doing this, filters do not work because they are active only after submitting the login form

maybe in the future

I agree this is a considerable flaw in the design as most people that customize login also want to setup additional features (for example cookies etc...)

Wouter.

[jtvrab]

I took your advice, hacking the "catalina.jar" file; editing the Authenticators.properties, and extended the FormAuthenticator class to log some method calls. I receive the following exception on deployment.


14:53:07,683 ERROR [Engine] ContextConfig[/jobwizard4] Cannot instantiate an authenticator of class com.blackdot.jw.security.JWFormAuthenticator
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: No ClassLoaders found for: com.blackdot.jw.security.JWFormAuthenticator
at org.jboss.mx.loading.LoadMgr.beginLoadTask(LoadMgr.java:161)

Any idea/s how to negotiate this exception? Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.