Rampart at the client side

[Arundhathi Menon]

Hi,

I am using rampart for WS security in my app.

I have placed the rampart.mar including the rampart jars in my WEB-INF/lib folder. For some reason , it doesnt seem to be able to read the file from the classpath. Please let me knwo what needs to be rectified. I do not want to point to a folder outside my app and want to pack in rampart along into my WAR file.

Caused by: org.apache.axis2.deployment.DeploymentException: The system is attempting to engage a module that is not available: rampart
at org.apache.axis2.deployment.DeploymentEngine.loadFromClassPath(DeploymentEngine.java:160)
at org.apache.axis2.deployment.FileSystemConfigurator.getAxisConfiguration(FileSystemConfigurator.java:134)
at org.apache.axis2.context.ConfigurationContextFactory.createConfigurationContext(ConfigurationContextFactory.java:64)
at org.apache.axis2.context.ConfigurationContextFactory.createConfigurationContextFromFileSystem(ConfigurationContextFactory.java:180) 

Thank you.

Regards
Menon

[Ulf Dittmer]

I have placed the rampart.mar including the rampart jars in my WEB-INF/lib folder.

*.mar files don't go into WEB-INF/lib - they go into WEB-INF/modules. And since *.mar files don't contain any jar files, all the jar files that come with Rampart need to go into WEB-INF/lib. (For Rampart 1.4 that would be opensaml-1.1.jar, rampart-core-1.4.jar, rampart-policy-1.4.jar, rampart-trust-1.4.jar, wss4j-1.5.4.jar and xmlsec-1.4.1.jar).

[Arundhathi Menon]

Hi Ulf,

Thank you for you quick response.

Will I have to pass this path as well? I am using the following method

createConfigurationContextFromFileSystem(String path,
                                                                            String axis2xml)

where path is null and the axis2xml file is specified.

Since path is null , it looks for it in the classpath. So if I am to place the *.mar file in the WEB-INF/module directory , will it automatically look it up? I mean , is it like a default path?

[Ulf Dittmer]

I'm sorry, I completely missed that you were asking about the client side. The client would of course NOT look automatically in WEB-INF/lib for jar files, so you'd need to add all of those to your classpath in some other way.

I don't know what's required to engage Rampart programmatically - I always engage it declaratively.

[Arundhathi Menon]

Thanks Ulf , for pointing that out.

Is packaging the rampart.mar file directly under src folder considered a good practise?

Am keen on bundling it all up in the app and am trying to figure out the best way to do it.

Or better still , do you think the class path attribute when I build the WAR file can be tweaked to accomodate these files n the classpath?

[Ulf Dittmer]

Now I'm confused. You mentioned "client side", but you keep talking about war files - is that web app a *WS client* or the *WS server*?

[Arundhathi Menon]

I am using Rampart on the client side.

My Web App is a consumer of a Web Service which requires Rampart for client authentication. Hence inorder to fire those web service calls , I need to package Rampart.mar in my WAR file.

I though all files under WEB-INF/lib would be loaded by the classloader and hence be on the classpath.

Seem to be runnning into issues configuring this

[Ulf Dittmer]

I though all files under WEB-INF/lib would be loaded by the classloader and hence be on the classpath.

Yes, but *.mar files are not *.jar files - they are accessed by the Rampart classes, not by the JRE classloader. I would imagine that one of the Rampart classes/methods you're using to set it up takes as a parameter the directory where it should look for *.mar files.

[Travis Hein]

yea, that really bugs me how the only way to initialize rampart is to specify file system path.

if you invoke the axis2 client from inside a servlet, where you have the ability to get a handle of

 String moduleFolder = request.getSession().getServletContext().getRealPath("/WEB-INF/module");

if not invoked from a servlet, perhaps an initial context listener, to interrogate the servletContext and jam the path into a JNDI, or application variable to be consumed later where you do the webservice client stuff.

[Arundhathi Menon]

Thanks Travis.

[Louis Amstutz]

Resurrecting this thread because I have the same problem. My client will be run from a browser with Java web start, so I can't really put a rampart repo with the rampart.mar on the client's machine. I would really like to have the rampart.mar in the jar file of the application. Does anyone know of a way to do this?

[Travis Hein]

I guess your applet could on boot up do a fetch, such as from URL the rampart and addressing mar files, and then stuff them into a local temporary folder.

for example.
* create a temporary folder on the local machine (e.g. File.createTempFile)
* pull down the mar files from the URL on the server into these machines.
* configure the axis2 context to refer to this temporary folder as the modules folder.

Other than that, I guess it might be possible to instruct axis2 to use a custom URL class loader which would load the modules directly from the URL, but doing that is not clear to me at this time.