Delegating authentication and ID management to an underlying enterprise service

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

One of my clients is interested in using your ���JForum�۪ product. I�۪ve been asked to make the product work with their enterprise authentication system. They use CA�۪s ���eTrust��? for enterprise identity management (see http://www3.ca.com/Solutions/SubSolution.asp?ID=4348 )

So far I�۪ve built a new DataAccessDriver implementation to support access to the ���eTrust�۪ authentication software. So far so good. However, to get this to work I�۪ve had to make one addition to the ���GroupModel�۪ interface. I�۪ve added a new method called��?

Public Group selectByName(String aName) throws Exception;

Eventually I'd like to offer these changes to JForum, how do I go about becoming a JForum contributor?

At a higher level I�۪ve noticed a major limitation to how your product implements user and groups. As both entities use an integer key that is maintained by the JForum schema, this forces any DataAccessDriver implementation that wants to use an external authentication service to still maintain entries in the user and group tables.

The way around this would be to change the entity id's from integer to string. But I suspect this would require wide ranging changes to the DB schema. Is there any appetite for such a change?




[originally posted on jforum.net by davout]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Well... about the integer id, you must keep in mind that many tables rely on user_id, like posts, topics, bookmarks, attachments and any other thing related to the user. So, if your users have an id like "ke763-kxy", you will have to relate it in some way to jforum_users.. maybe addint a new column, which will be manipulated by your UserModel implementation, for example. This is a delicated situation.
Which are your points?

About your changes to GroupModel, they're ok to me, and you can send your updates that I add them to the core code without any problem.

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]