Forum: Ruby on Rails RoR authentication with IBM Notes/Domino

This is a very simple authentication system for a Ruby on Rails server 
in
the same internet domain. It will allow you to get back the username of 
the
person hitting your server provided they already have authenticated with 
an
IBM Lotus/Domino or Websphere server that uses multi-server based 
session
authentication.
IBM Domino/Websphere authentication works by placing an encrypted cookie 
for
a given domain. There are a number of ways to find out what this cookie
means.
For instance, you could either:
1. Decrypt the cookie using the secret key in the domino directory; or
2. Pass that cookie along to a live domino server and get back the 
username.
In this example, we are going to use the second option. This means we 
take
that cookie and then pass it to an IBM server to check the 
authentication.
The cookie is stored in as LTPA token. Here is the ruby on rails code:

require 'open-uri'

module DominoAuthenication

public
# accesses the current user from the session.
# overwrite this to set how the current user is retrieved from the 
session.
# To store just the whole user model in the session:
#
# def current_user
# session[:user]
# end
#
def current_user
if session[:user]
@current_user ||= session[:user]
else
begin
tokenstring = "LtpaToken="
tokenstring = tokenstring + cookies[:LtpaToken] if cookies[:LtpaToken]
OpenURI.open_uri('http://[your domino server here]/[your database]/[some
page that returns the username]',
"Cookie" => tokenstring) do |http|
@current_user = http.read.strip
end
#rescue
end
end
end
end

On the domino side, you just need to create a database and then a page
within the database that has a field returning @username().
This will then return the full username. If you are using QuickPlace for
instance, you will get back something like
"CN=user/OU=placename/OU=QP/O=certifier" and you can deal with this as 
you
like in your ruby code.

But how did you put Domino and ROR under the same domain? Can you
describe more your solution?

David

As long as you have the RoR on a server in the same domain, e.g.
http://www.projectlounge.com is the domino server, and
http://ror.projectlounge.com is the Ruby on Rails server, then it will 
be in
the same domain when you set the authentication to work across the 
domain.

You could also have them on the same server, and then just use mod 
rewrite
to direct requests based on the URL for instance
http://www.projectlounge.com/dominorails/* will go the RoR server and 
the
rest goes to domino.

This is how we are expanding IBM QuickPlace with RoR code and it seems 
to
work fairly well. You get the ability to write quick features in RoR 
that
you can link into Domino.

I have started to write a DominoRecord type base class that can make it 
a
little faster to include Domino models. Email me if you want to help 
with
that.

Ian.