Cactus and Form-Based Authentication
Quick Summary: Did you know it's possible to login (with form-based authentication) before running each of your testXX methods in a ServletTestCase or CactusStrutsTestCase? Just add a "begin" method in your Base class, or in each of your Tests, and it will be called automatically, just like setUp() is called.
public void begin(WebRequest request) {
request.setRedirectorName("ServletRedirectorSecure");
request.setAuthentication(new FormAuthentication("tomcat","tomcat"));
}
Long and Winded:
Yesterday, I began adding the "roles" attribute to my Struts action-mappings - to limit access for certain user roles (Yes, XDoclet 1.2 supports this). This worked great in my web UI, until I tried to run my StrutsTestCases. Access was denied because I was not logged in. Rather, I was "faking it" by retrieving a UserForm object in my setUp() method and stuffing it into the session [View Source]. This worked like a charm until I added the roles restriction.
Cactus has a nice feature: if you write a beginXX method, it will be called before your testXX method. In other words, begin = client, test = server. So I added a number of beginEdit, beginSave, etc. method to my Action Tests. Great - everything worked. But it was ugly to add all those beginXX methods. Then, via Vincent Massol's wisdom, I learned of the global begin(WebRequest wr) method. Now I simply have a begin() method in my BaseStrutsTestCase class, and everything works as smooth as pie.
public void begin(WebRequest request) {
request.setRedirectorName("ServletRedirectorSecure");
request.setAuthentication(new FormAuthentication("tomcat","tomcat"));
}
A couple of issues I discovered:
- If you have an Action that doesn't have any roles in any of it's mappings, this will fail, so you have to override the begin() method with an empty {} method in your *Test.class. I believe the error message was it couldn't find the SecureServletRedirector.
- You must define all the roles (you plan to authenticate with) in your Ant build.xml file. [Read More]
- My <error-code>403<error-code> is not working on AppFuse or the current real-world app I'm working on. [Read More]
All in all, I'm pretty pumped that Cactus makes it this easy to test my app in its true production environment.
Later: I figured out the source of the 403 error-page not rendering. Once again, my Compression Filter does more harm than good. I switched it out for a more recent GZIPFilter and the same thing happens. The good news is that the new filter works on Resin, whereas the old one did not.