Externalizing PicketLink configuration? How?

[pipo1000]

Hello,

Our application is being installed on multiple servers by consultants and customers. The current way of configuring SAML with PicketLink consists of changing the picklink-idfed.xml which is within the WAR file. However we need a way to configure the IdentityURL, ServiceURL and trusts etc. from our own property file or other external source, but not by changing a file within the WAR file. How can I do this, is there a programmatic interface within PicketLink to do this?

Thanks in advance,

Edwin

[anil.saldhana]

Edwin,  we have not yet dealt with that.  I know that this is a challenge at deployment.  Since this is open source, I suggest that you can start a discussion around this in the PicketLink Discussion forum and we will gladly give you commit rights to bring in the changes (that we agree on in the discussion forum).

[pipo1000]

I have changed the class org.picketlink.identity.federation.bindings.tomcat.sp.BaseFormAuthenticator so it will first check for a system property before reading the WEB-INF/picketlink-idfed.xml file.

private void processStart() throws LifecycleException
{
    Handlers handlers = null;

    ServletContext servletContext = context.getServletContext();

    InputStream is = null;
    String filenaam = System.getProperty("SSOConfig");
    if (filenaam != null)
    {
        try
        {
            is = new FileInputStream(filenaam);
        }
        catch (java.io.FileNotFoundException e)
        {
            // nothing         
        }

        if (is == null) throw new RuntimeException(filenaam + " missing");
    } else
    {
        is = servletContext.getResourceAsStream(configFile);
        if (is == null) throw new RuntimeException(configFile + " missing");
    }

....

....

[anil.saldhana]

The last release of PL has externalizing configuration feature.  Take a look.

[pipo1000]

Can you point me in the right direction? Do you mean the trunk or release 1.04? I just checked out your commits to the trunk and I could not find any configuration changes.

[anil.saldhana]

Sorry Edwin.  The STS configuration is pluggagle.

http://community.jboss.org/wiki/PicketLinkSTS-PluggableConfigurationHandlers

I wanted to do the same for the IDP/SP, but was not motivated enough to do it for 1.0.4    Will punt it for 1.0.5

[jasonperrone]

Has this ever been resolved? I have implemented a ZERO code solution in my Tomcat app for this, meaning I am only using PL to forward to an IdentityURL and that forwards back to me with a SAML response. I don't want to get into subclassing anything. I only want to be able to make the config changes to the Tomcat web.xml, not my app's web.xml.