[Koha-devel] Re: [Koha] Re: MARC support

[Joshua Brindle]

You are right, but consider this

practically every cgi page includes C4::Auth.

Now, say i want to put in ldap authentication, i have to go modify Auth.pm to do what I want, and if the API changes i have to go fix my own auth.pm to continue working. the correct way to do this is to have a wrapper that does the interface between koha and the authentication module. you should never have to modify modules that come with koha to make a new authentication method, it should work like this

 

app includes C4::Auth

initialize autnetication wrapper with optional argument (being the authentication module to use)

either C4::Auth uses the module in the argument, or reverts to the default DBI authentication

 

the default DBI authentication in C4 would inherit the methods in the optional authentication module so that the authentication module can do as much or as little as needed. For example, ldap would only verify the password, and get the card number, but the other fuctions like userflags, permissions, etc would not be overwritten and thus still handled by the DBI authentication. Here is another example.. Most universities have the patron information in another (possibly proprietary) database. The proprietary database might would have the patrons card number, and name information, but nothing else. so this users custom authentication module would only overwrite the getborrowernumber method, but no other. that user should be able to drop in that 1 method and allow the default DBI authentication to do the rest.

 

Now, c4::auth does contain all the authentication but if the user wants to change authentication methods he'll have to overwrite auth.pm and possibly repeat a lot of it, or spend considable time changing all the pages to include something other than C4::Auth.

 

I may be rambling now, but this is how it should work, so that the actual program is never changed so that api changes don't destroy the systems. This should work on things other than authentication too, such as data storage. Thanks, and i hope i didn't ramble this into confusion :)

 

 

 

Joshua Brindle
UNIX Administrator
Southern Nazarene University

>>> paul POULAIN <address@hidden> 01/15/03 09:44AM >>>
Joshua Brindle a écrit:

What is the timeline for the authentication stuff?
I've gone through some of the authentication stuff and it seems deeply embedded (ie: not modular)

to do this right the authentication should be completely abstracted from the app and allow a simple drop in authentication replacement. If this were the case i'd happilly write the ldap stuff. Are there plans to modularize all this stuff? Thanks....

Unless I'm missing something, everything around auth is done in C4::Auth.pm package, so i don't understand why it's not modular ???

-- 
Paul POULAIN
Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres
responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)