LDAP authentication improvement

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

I noticed (and please correct me if i�m wrong) that the only way to validate a user login against a LDAP service is using the user and password provided in the login page to connect to LDAP service and search inside for some attributes.

I�m now trying to configure jforum to work in a different scenario, where i have an unique user/pass to access the ldap server and the user/pass provided in the login page must be searched in the LDAP directory.

the class that do the work is LDAPAuthenticator and the method is the following:

	public User validateLogin(String username, String password, Map extraParams)
	{
		Hashtable environment = this.prepareEnvironment();
		
		StringBuffer principal = new StringBuffer(256)
			.append(SystemGlobals.getValue(ConfigKeys.LDAP_LOGIN_PREFIX))
			.append([color=darkred]username[/color])
			.append(',')
			.append(SystemGlobals.getValue(ConfigKeys.LDAP_LOGIN_SUFFIX));
		
		environment.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL, principal.toString());
		environment.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS, password);
		
		DirContext dir = null;
		
		try {
			dir = new InitialDirContext(environment);
			
			String lookupPrefix = SystemGlobals.getValue(ConfigKeys.LDAP_LOOKUP_PREFIX);
			String lookupSuffix = SystemGlobals.getValue(ConfigKeys.LDAP_LOOKUP_SUFFIX);
			
			if (lookupPrefix == null || lookupPrefix.length() == 0) {
				lookupPrefix = SystemGlobals.getValue(ConfigKeys.LDAP_LOGIN_PREFIX);
			}
			
			if (lookupSuffix == null || lookupSuffix .length() == 0) {
				lookupSuffix = SystemGlobals.getValue(ConfigKeys.LDAP_LOGIN_SUFFIX);
			}

			String lookupPrincipal = lookupPrefix + username + "," + lookupSuffix ;

			Attribute att = dir.getAttributes(lookupPrincipal ).get(SystemGlobals.getValue(ConfigKeys.LDAP_FIELD_EMAIL));
			
			SSOUtils utils = new SSOUtils();
			
			if (!utils.userExists(username)) {
				String email = att != null ? (String)att.get() : "noemail";
				utils.register("ldap", email);
			}
			
			return utils.getUser();
		}
		catch (AuthenticationException e) {
			return null;
		}
        catch (NamingException e)
        {
            return null;
        }
        finally {
			if (dir != null) {
                try
                {
                    dir.close();
                }
                catch (NamingException e)
                {
                    //close jndi context
                }
            }
		}
	}

Does anyone have an implementation of what i want to do? If I do it, would you like to include it to improve Jforum?

Any comments?
Cheers!
JG
[originally posted on jforum.net by jgallardo]