Embedded flows in MFA flows? Some other way to poll?

[Cantor, Scott]

On 10/27/17, 2:29 PM, "dev on behalf of Greg Haverkamp" <dev-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of gahaverkamp at lbl.gov> wrote:

> Ideally, I'd then like to be able to able to poll for authentication status.  I can do that by repeatedly submitting a form and
> checking the current status and responding properly in the flow, but I'd ideally like to be able to do it without the
> POST-REDIRECT-GET process.  However, I'm feeling pretty dense, and I can't tell if, operating as a subflow within the MFA flow, I
> can even do things like initiate my embedded flow as embedded so I can use the spring-js stuff.  Or, perhaps there's another way
> to do it I'm not aware of.  (Or, if I can't even understand this level, there's always the question of whether I should tackle it at all.)

I'm no webflow expert and I'm not much of a web developer at this point so I don't know much about how these kinds of things interact. My main problem is since I don't know what your Javascript would be doing exactly, I can't really say whether I think it would work.

I think as long as the call it's making from the browser to the server to poll is happening exclusively as the driver of the flow's behavior forward, it can do whatever it wants to do while the outer window just waits, and then eventually I guess it would pick control back up and resubmit with an updated flow execution key. That key parameter is what tracks the state of the flow (the eNsN just means "conversation number plus state number".

I'm sure it would be tricky to pull, but likely not impossible.

Another strategy is what we did with logout, we treated the frames doing the logout propagation as a separate top level flow, and we stuffed information into the session and/or on the URL to communicate the necessary state into it.

-- Scott