[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Best way to authenticate users against Evergreen

[Mark Jordan]

Hi,

I've looked through most of the docs and can't find any mention of an API to authenticate users against their credentials in Evergreen. Is there such an API (preferably a web-servicy one)? I saw the dicussion in the list archives from last May about writing a Perl script to pull up patron info via OpenSRF, but that's about all I've come across.

I'm writing a Drupal module that will use "drivers" to authenticate against whatever external auth source will respond, focusing for now on library-oriented sources like ILSs since there are already Drupal modules for LDAP, Shib, Pubcookie, etc. Each driver is a small PHP file that simply returns TRUE or FALSE, and optimially an email address, for a user who logs into Drupal. (It also allows you to modify the login form programmatically but that's independent of the authentication.) If the account is not an existing local Drupal account, the request is routed to the driver (configured by the site admin) and an account is either created or logged in if the driver returns TRUE after talkikg to the external auth source. If the driver returns FALSE, the user is told the standard Drupal "unrecognized username or password".

I've got a working driver for Innovative (wich has a RESTful patron API) and a sample/generic SQL driver. I've figured out enough about Evergreen's actor.usr table to authenticate using it (well, it will work in Drupal 7 since in Drupal 6 you can't switch between MySQL and Postgres nicely), but if there's a more API-oriented way to query for users, I'd rather use that. I've looked for a PHP library for OpenSRF but didn't find any.

Mark

Mark Jordan
Head of Library Systems
W.A.C. Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6, Canada
Voice: 778.782.5753 / Fax: 778.782.3023
mjordan at sfu.ca