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HTTP Basic Authentication
mathieud
over 7 years ago
Is HTTP Basic Authentication only available for Web APIs? Could it be used to login to other sections of Appian?
OriginalPostID-239972
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Eduardo Fuentes
Appian Employee
over 7 years ago
It is also available for
forum.appian.com/.../Custom_Servlet_Plug-ins.html
which can do anything you need with the API.
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mathieud
over 7 years ago
So it would not be available to access a Record Dashboard?
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Eduardo Fuentes
Appian Employee
over 7 years ago
I don't think so. For that use case it is easier to use a WebAPI to pull out the relevant record data.
You could create a custom servlet that would simply do a redirect to the URL of the record dashboard but that's pretty much all it'd do, authenticate and redirect so maybe not of much help.
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mathieud
over 7 years ago
It could work if you stay authenticated after the redirect.
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mathieud
over 7 years ago
Which does not seem to be the case...
forum.appian.com/.../Custom_Servlet_Plug-ins.html
"Any servlet that maps to to the URL pattern /plugins/servlet/stateless/* will be a stateless servlet and will use HTTP Basic Authentication on each request to authenticate each request and should not access or create a JEE session.
All servlets that match /plugins/servlet/* but do not match /plugins/servlet/stateless/* are not stateless and require the user to have an authenticated session in order to access them, but do have access to a JEE session."
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Eduardo Fuentes
Appian Employee
over 7 years ago
Good point. How about Embedded interfaces? but that means you'd embedded the record somewhere else and use SSO to log you in.
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mathieud
over 7 years ago
Wouldn't work because I require HTTP Authentication.
To give you a bit of background, I'm looking at a way to automate PDF snapshots of Record Dashboards at certain steps in the process to avoid having to generate a document for each type of dashboard that we have. I was thinking of creating a plugin that would use wkhtmltopdf (open source html to pdf library) to do this. Only issue is that the library uses HTTP Authentication for taking snapshots of protected pages. Most Web APIs that do these kinds of snapshots also mostly support HTTP Authentication (probably because they are probably all based on wkhtmltopdf).
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chetany
A Score Level 1
over 7 years ago
@mathieud, you can probably use a headless browser like HTMLUnit which is Java based. Using a headless browser you can navigate programmatically to web pages. Then you could use the wkhtmltopdf library to take a screenshot of the record dashboard.
There are many headless browsers available - PhantomJS is another one. I do not have experience with them though. The authentication can be specified to headless browser.
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mathieud
over 7 years ago
Yeah, that could work. Has anyone tried running a headless browser inside a plugin before?
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