Get list of users from JBoss AS?
I'll preface this post by saying that I'm new to J2EE. My problem is that some of our code that ran on Tomcat 5.0.28 doesn't work on JBoss 4.0.3CR2.
Principal p = request.getUserPrincipal();
This code in Tomcat 5.0.28 returned a principle that we could use to reflectively invoke 'getRealm' to get the LDAP config info that was stored in our webapp's context.xml. In JBoss 4.0.3CR2, it returns a SimplePrinciple which doesn't have the 'getRealm' method. This is the root of the problem, but it's not really what I want to fix. I want to remove the LDAP dependency from our code and just query JAAS or the app server itself, whichever is the more proper J2EE way to do it.
There's a servlet that gets a list of users in a specific role, which are added to a combo box in a JSP. Here's the code that sets up the connection to LDAP:
Object r = p.getClass().getMethod("getRealm", null).invoke(p, null);
// The hashtable to hold the LDAP details to setup the connection
Hashtable env = new Hashtable ();
// Pull all the relevant data out of the realm with reflection
String connectionFactory = (String) r.getClass().getMethod("getContextFactory", null).invoke (r, null);
String connectionName = (String) r.getClass().getMethod("getConnectionName", null).invoke (r, null);
String connectionPassword = (String) r.getClass().getMethod("getConnectionPassword", null).invoke (r, null);
String connectionURL = (String) r.getClass().getMethod ("getConnectionURL", null).invoke (r, null);
String authentication = (String) r.getClass().getMethod("getAuthentication", null).invoke (r, null);
String protocol = (String) r.getClass().getMethod("getProtocol", null).invoke (r, null);
String referrals = (String) r.getClass().getMethod ("getReferrals", null).invoke (r, null);
String userBase = (String) r.getClass().getMethod ("getUserBase", null).invoke (r, null);
String roleBase = (String) r.getClass().getMethod ("getRoleBase", null).invoke (r, null);This code may be "bad" because I'm sure there are much better ways to do this. I didn't write it but I'm looking to replace it with something not dependent on LDAP.
I know what this code is doing, pulling out the LDAP config information that Tomcat read from the context.xml (which is where database connections and Realms were defined in Tomcat 5.0.28), and then using that to set up the JNDI lookup to reconnect to the LDAP server.
Here's the question though: Shouldn't there be a way to query the application server for this information instead of going directly to LDAP? This creates a dependency I don't want in the code. If we take away LDAP and switch JBoss to a JAAS policy using file-based authentication for some reason, the code trying to get to LDAP will fail.
If I switched out the LDAP lookups to JAAS lookups, that would work. Or if it's more "proper" to query the app server in some other way, I'd like to find out how.
Sorry for a bit of a jumbled post. I hope someone can point me in the right direction. Using google up until now has been an exercise in information overload for me. :)
- Jeff
