Hi Dean, On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 7:49 PM, Dean G Weber <[email protected]>wrote:

I've been struggling for a while with the dilemma of getting a user into a group. Let me supply some background on what we've been trying to do with Xwiki.

We're trying to use Xwiki for an internal collaborative site. Management has decided that users of the wiki must complete proper training. Without the training, the user cannot add to the wiki pages.

For authentication, we've connected the wiki to our LDAP server via the xwik.cfg file. Authenticated users are automatically placed into the XWikiAllGroup by default. In order to accommodate management requirements, I created a new user group... let's call it "TrainedUsersGroup".

Once authenticated, users are placed into the Webhome page of the wiki. I've placed Velocity script on the Webhome page to check if the user is in the TrainedUsersGroup. If the user is not in the group, the user is redirected to the NoAccess.WebHome page.

On the NoAccess.Webhome page another check is made to determine if the user is in the TrainedUsersGroup. If the user is not in the group, a call is made to a Groovy class (on another page in the Groovy namespace). The groovy code executes a system call to grep on the Linux system running the Xwiki against a CSV file pulled from an intranet web report. The passed user's login (which is the same as the LDAP user id) is checked against this file. If the returned grep output shows that the training has been completed, the NoAccess.WebHome page will attempt to add the user to the TrainedUsersGroup. If the user is added to the TrainedUsersGroup as determined after another check, the user is redirected back to the originating WebHome page.

This mechanism works great if the user accessing the pages is an admin. However, if the user is a regular user everything except the addition to the group works. Instead, the code to place the user in the group displays on the page. It does not run and put the user into the TrainedUsersGroup. This is no good for our needs in which we must restrict Xwiki access for non-trained users.

"Instead, the code to place the user in the group displays on the page." *-> question:* does the wiki receive the grep output in all cases? Can you get the output printed on the screen even if the context user isn't an admin? If not, the problem arises earlier and you'd need to identify exactly where it comes from. *-> observation:* this issue is typical of lacking programming rights. Programming rights are different from other rights in that the check is not made on whether the current user has programming rights. The check is made on whether the page that holds the groovy script was saved with someone holding programming rights. This is why the check you're doing against the visiting user doesn't work. Programming rights work this way in order to prevent a non-authorized person to create and execute a privileged script. Therefore what matters is the state of the page holding your script at the point when it is being called. What is somehow happening is that the system thinks the page holding the script has been saved by the current user at some point and thus displays its literal content instead of running the code. Thus you may want to check whether your application makes XWiki think that the context user is the one who saved the groovy page. You need to make sure that XWiki doesn't think that the NoAccess.WebHome page holding your second script has been saved by the current user. Check for occurences of $doc.save() (velocity) or doc.save() (groovy) in your code and make sure that XWiki thinks the user performing the action is an user with programming rights. I'm not a developer so I can't do much more for you here, hope it makes things a bit clearer though. Good luck! (My original goal was to connect to our Oracle database and based upon the

user id determine directly if the user has completed the training. I've had luck with a simple Groovy script running on my desktop and on the Linux server. However, from within the Xwiki Groovy console or on a page, I get no output. Therefore, I have abandoned the Oracle query check via Groovy.)

I've been researching the Xwiki user list for weeks. I've poured over xwiki documentation. I've peeked at wiki page source. I've done all this in an attempt to figure out how to get a user to place himself into a group. I've found a lot of confusing and contradicting information. Programming rights are mentioned. The only place I found the ability to set this right was in the xwiki administration. I can't determine if the problem is even related to programming rights. I've put a debug statement on the NoAccess.WebHome page to print whether the user visiting the page has programming rights. In all cases it display that they do. Yet, only admins can add themselves to the TrainedUsersGroup. This doesn't work for me. I need to automatically add the visiting user to the TrainedUsersGroup once the training has been validated.

Btw, I'm really sorry about you experiencing this frustrating experience. Hope this email will help a bit. *-> shameless plug:* XWiki SAS (www.xwiki.com) offers development support services to help you when faced with such hurdles. I'm aware you might not be in a position where you can consider this offer, but you'd have the guarantee of getting an appropriate answer in a short timeframe (vs community support, although it's usually pretty fast on these lists) plus it's a great way to help the development of the XWiki project if you like the product + well, it would have saved you days and effort thus making save money in the end ;-)

What is the problem? Why won't the user go into the group? Is there a better way of doing this? Any help, code snippets or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Dean Weber Sr Software Engineer II Raytheon Technical Services Company LLC _______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users

Guillaume -- Guillaume Lerouge Product Manager - XWiki Skype: wikibc Twitter: glerouge http://guillaumelerouge.com/

Dean G Weber wrote:

I've been struggling for a while with the dilemma of getting a user into a group. Let me supply some background on what we've been trying to do with Xwiki.

We're trying to use Xwiki for an internal collaborative site. Management has decided that users of the wiki must complete proper training. Without the training, the user cannot add to the wiki pages.

For authentication, we've connected the wiki to our LDAP server via the xwik.cfg file. Authenticated users are automatically placed into the XWikiAllGroup by default. In order to accommodate management requirements, I created a new user group... let's call it "TrainedUsersGroup".

Once authenticated, users are placed into the Webhome page of the wiki. I've placed Velocity script on the Webhome page to check if the user is in the TrainedUsersGroup. If the user is not in the group, the user is redirected to the NoAccess.WebHome page.

On the NoAccess.Webhome page another check is made to determine if the user is in the TrainedUsersGroup. If the user is not in the group, a call is made to a Groovy class (on another page in the Groovy namespace). The groovy code executes a system call to grep on the Linux system running the Xwiki against a CSV file pulled from an intranet web report. The passed user's login (which is the same as the LDAP user id) is checked against this file. If the returned grep output shows that the training has been completed, the NoAccess.WebHome page will attempt to add the user to the TrainedUsersGroup. If the user is added to the TrainedUsersGroup as determined after another check, the user is redirected back to the originating WebHome page.

This mechanism works great if the user accessing the pages is an admin. However, if the user is a regular user everything except the addition to the group works. Instead, the code to place the user in the group displays on the page. It does not run and put the user into the TrainedUsersGroup. This is no good for our needs in which we must restrict Xwiki access for non-trained users.

(My original goal was to connect to our Oracle database and based upon the user id determine directly if the user has completed the training. I've had luck with a simple Groovy script running on my desktop and on the Linux server. However, from within the Xwiki Groovy console or on a page, I get no output. Therefore, I have abandoned the Oracle query check via Groovy.)

I've been researching the Xwiki user list for weeks. I've poured over xwiki documentation. I've peeked at wiki page source. I've done all this in an attempt to figure out how to get a user to place himself into a group. I've found a lot of confusing and contradicting information. Programming rights are mentioned. The only place I found the ability to set this right was in the xwiki administration. I can't determine if the problem is even related to programming rights. I've put a debug statement on the NoAccess.WebHome page to print whether the user visiting the page has programming rights. In all cases it display that they do. Yet, only admins can add themselves to the TrainedUsersGroup. This doesn't work for me. I need to automatically add the visiting user to the TrainedUsersGroup once the training has been validated.

What is the problem? Why won't the user go into the group? Is there a better way of doing this? Any help, code snippets or suggestions would be appreciated.

How exactly are you adding the user to that group? If you create an XWikiGroups object, add it to the group document, then save it, you should use saveWithProgrammingRights() instead of save(). -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/