Why doesn't Java's request.getAttributeNames() show Shibboleth attributes?

[Philip Durbin]

Hi Etienne,

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 2:40 AM, Etienne Dysli-Metref
<etienne.dysli-metref at switch.ch> wrote:
> On 19/06/15 22:53, Michael A Grady wrote:
>> The same is true in Tomcat, they don't get listed in the enumeration
>> of the list, but they are there if you explicitly call them. Not sure
>> what the reason is for that behavior. Sure does seem like a bug. And,
>> to get REMOTE_USER thru the getRemoteUser(), you may need to
>> configure 'tomcatAuthentication="false"' on the AJP connector (or the
>> Glassfish equivalent).
>
> This "bug" has already been reported against Tomcat 6 [1] and "fixed" by
> amending the documentation. There is some explanation of it in a SO
> question [2] but the main point is, from [1]:
>
>> I looked at just including all the Tomcat internal attributes in the
>> return from getAttributeNames() but this causes problems with the
>> Servlet 2.5 TCK tests which expect that getAttributeNames() return
>> only those attributes that have been set via setAttribute().
>
> So apparently, one can't fix this without breaking the Servlet
> Technology Compatibility Kit, at least version 2.5. This behaviour is
> now documented in the Apache Tomcat Connector Reference Guide [3] under
> "JkEnvVar":
>
>> You can retrieve the variables on Tomcat as request attributes via
>> request.getAttribute(attributeName). Note that the variables send
>> via JkEnvVar will not be listed in request.getAttributeNames().
>
> By reading that guide one would think it only concerns mod_jk, but this
> also seems to apply to mod_proxy_ajp...
>
>   Etienne
>
> [1] https://bz.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=47364
> [2]
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7338346/why-does-servletrequest-getattribute-have-different-attributes-then-getattribu
> [3] http://tomcat.apache.org/connectors-doc/reference/apache.html

Thanks! This was quite interesting and helpful!

(Thanks to everyone else who replied as well!)

Some day I might try to print out JkEnvVar to see if enumerate all the
Shibboleth attributes I've received.

Phil

-- 
Philip Durbin
Software Developer for http://dataverse.org
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/people/philip-durbin