OpenAthens SP to Shibboleth (using OA Federation): Deep Links

[Peter Schober]

* Manoj Kancharla <manojk at silverchair.com> [2016-01-26 16:53]:
> Yes, here is an example in our context: he user clicks on “Sign in
> via OpenAthens” link from an article page. I’m doing a redirect to
> the Shibboleth handler like this:
> https://{0}/Shibboleth.sso/Login?entityID={1}&target={2} , where {0)
> = hostname, {1}=genericEntityID (OA), and {2}=the Url of the page
> from where the user initiated the login.

That should Just Work and is the "obvious" way to do that with the
Shib SP (modulo only exposing your own web "API" -- as a wrapper to
the Shib handlerURL -- and redirecting to those URLs in your own
code. Maybe that's what you're doing already, anyway.)

> What’s happening now is that user is taken to the Athens
> Authentication Point and (after sign in) user is taken back to the
> home page : https://{0}/index.aspx<https://%7b0%7d/index.aspx>
> (instead of the article page)

You'll need to trace the HTTP requests and reponses to see who sends
you where. The first thing would be to check where the SP puts the
RelayState, i.e., Sessions/@relayState in shibboleth2.xml
According to
https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/SHIB2/NativeSPSessions
you could unset this to cause relayState to become the verbatim URL
the SP sees as "target".
If that looks OK look for the redirect that happens right after the
HTTP POST to the Shib SP's ACS URL -- and any redirects after that
(those are not the SP's doing, but still).
HTH,
-peter