New subject: [xwiki-dev] Shibbing XWiki

29 Nov 2005

Hi there,

I've been looking at "shibbing" XWiki - i.e. turning it into a  
Shibboleth compatible Service Provider. I've done that bit, using the  
Guanxi system:

http://guanxi.uhi.ac.uk/xwiki

The goal of "shibbing" xwiki is to allow users from certain named  
institutions to automatically login to xwiki and have an account  
created on the fly, based on their attributes. What this involves is  
two steps:

1) Protect an XWiki Shibboleth Login page with Guanxi - I've done that
2) Based on the SAML Assertion from their Identity Provider,  
authenticate them - I've done that too (almost!)
3) Create them an account on the fly once authentication succeeds.  
The information required to create an account (username etc.) would  
come from their Identity Provider in SAML Attribute Assertions. I've  
still to do this.

What I'm wondering is there a way to create users on the fly without  
having an XWikiContext? What I'd like to do is create a new class  
that can create XWiki users directly.

The goal of Guanxi + XWiki is an XWiki at, say UHI Millennium  
Institute that will allow users at the University of Leeds or Oxford  
who are software developers to login automatically, using their Leeds  
or Oxford username, with their accounts being created on the fly, so  
they don't need to register.

I've done about 80% of the work, I just need a cleaner way of  
creating users without having to use the XWikiContext and request  
parameter maps etc.

Hope you can help,

thanks,

Alistair