OpenSAML Velocity templates for POST etc. responses

[Cantor, Scott]

On 1/3/13 11:01 PM, "Michael A Grady" <mgrady at unicon.net> wrote:
>
>Scott, do you think the Shib Dev team would consider adding a
>'classes/templates' directory to the 'src/main/webapp/WEB-INF' directory
>of the Shib IdP distribution, with four sample Velocity templates that
>could be used to override the OpenSAML ones? Have them named the same,
>but with a ".ga" (for Google Analytics) as an additional suffix so that
>an institution wanting to use them has to rename them before doing the
>'install'? These templates would have the Google Analytics tracking code
>embedded in them (that is generic, and would work for anyone), and woudl
>otherwise be identical to the current OpenSAML ones.

I would not be in favor of having anything that uses third party cookies
or web tracking included in the code base. If somebody wants to do this,
they can download any example files you want to post and do it easily
enough. I think that's less confusing then renaming the files anyway.

I *am* willing to add a stubbed/empty #include to the templates in the jar
file if it turns out that it's possible to include something from the
classpath that lives in WEB-INF. Then they would just add the bits to that
file so that instead of including nothing, it includes whatever they want
it to include.

That's slightly better in that it avoids duplicating the existing
templates, but it's not a lot better.

>That would also have the advantage of making it easier/clearer to
>deployers how they could otherwise modify those templates for other
>purposes. For example, as the following documentation at CalNet indicated
>they changed those templates (and used the internal.xml file config
>option I asked about before):

I thought I documented the template option somewhere after I used it but I
don't know for certain that I did. It probably belongs under
Productionalization as a how-to.

-- Scott