getPrincipals() typing

[Cantor, Scott]

On 8/31/16, 7:38 PM, "dev on behalf of Klingenstein, Nate" <dev-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of nklingenstein at calstate.edu> wrote:

> I'm all for indirection and recycling, but I don't get why in this instance.  Why reuse
> Principal if you can't make any assumptions about it at all and it forces you to use the
> janky data structure?

The data structure might be slightly more elegant if I had defined it, but if you think I would have been able to model "identity" better, sorry, I'd have ended up in the same place. I might not have modeled roles/groups as Principals like they did, but then again I might have.

One good reason is that JAAS returns a Subject. 
    
> The entire URL is apparently used to do dispatch.  authn/Password?s1e2 is entirely
> different from authn/Wrapper?s1e3, but they could be landing at the same point.

I don't think so, no. Those are in general likely two different flows that are themselves subflows and not meant to be run directly at all. You should never see that path anywhere in a URL.

> I appreciate that all of this is done by Webflow, and that's where I will end up after
> this message finishes routing.  I'm not trying to change how it works, but I do want to
> understand it all.

Then I'll assume you've read the entire webflow documentation, because you're not going to get far without doing that. It also isn't all that long actually.

> It's proscribed if you have it all in your head.  I can assure you that, if you don't know
> the implementation well, it feels like there is no state.

Everything under the ProfileRequestContext object is state. Occasionally there's state in the usual Java Session/Request attribute places, and there's the StorageService state. Only the latter is persistent across flow executions.
    
> I now understand why you would need a new developer to spend months reading the code to
> come up to speed.  You need to have an incredible amount of stuff in working memory, or
> you need to trace everything down to the letter.

I have a photographic memory without really having a photographic memory. There's some word for whatever just short of that is, and that's what I have. But only for code and other text. Visual images and diagrams leave no impression on me once they're not in front of me.

-- Scott