Clarification on custom attributes

[Cantor, Scott]

On 2/22/17, 11:46 AM, "users on behalf of BPottier at andovercos.com" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of BPottier at andovercos.com> wrote:

> Disclaimer: I’m not a developer … but I want to get the developers I work with onboard with writing a custom action to
> validate username password against a DynamoDB table. I’ve done the research there as far as writing a bean and
> inheriting from the AbstractUsernamePasswordValidationAction class. The process of validating the user seems relatively
> straightforward. My question is how do I approach attributes? Just need some help getting an idea so I can sell it to the
> developers.

A quick search says there's a JDBC driver for it (I have no idea what it is, I just did a quick check), so the answer is that for authentication I'd just go find a JAAS plugin for JDBC-based login, and for attribute access you just use the built-in JDBC support.

So no development needed on either, unless there's no such JAAS plugin around anymore. If there's really nothing much out there anymore, I'm happy to add a JAAS module for JDBC to a future release, it's hardly rocket science.

The challenge with either is that finding drivers with working connection management is tough. Any network issues at all and my experience lately is that they all hang the IdP due to TCP closures. It's just not something I trust much anymore. There's no reason it can't work, but people just don't build reliable network code in those drivers.

-- Scott