[kforge-dev] Authentication bug: not finding the cookie

[Rufus Pollock]

John Bywater wrote:
> Rufus Pollock wrote:
> 
>> Looking at the code this implies that there **are** cookies in the 
>> request but that there is no kui session cookie:
>>
>>
>>            ............
>>                 kui_auth_cookie = cookies.get('kui_auth')
> 
> 
> 
> That's the problem: the cookie isn't called 'kui_auth' anymore, but 
> 'kforge_auth'.
> 
> I've fixed the cookie name up by using the kforge.dicitonarywords 
> constant, so we don't suffer from the same word mismatch in the furture. 
> I'm also just finishing refactoring the (very long) procedural 
> mod_python handlers we have into an OO style [1], and in the process 

Yes I'd already seen the start on that and it looked a lot cleaner than 
the *very* long methods we'd ended up with.

> putting those objects under unit test. I've also reviewed the mod_python 
> manual, and improved the way a few things are done. I hope the redirect 
> to login is also sorted out. I also rewrote the apache config fragment, 
> to be clearer about what happens [2] (search for 'Satisfy Any') . But I 
> didn't check everything in yet.
> 
> The only reason we were thinking this code was difficult to test is 
> because we needed to import apache, which you can't do from the unit 
> test suite. But we only need to import apache for apache return codes 
> (apache.OK, etc). So I've written the handlers to return more human 

Good point (I thought we also used it for the cookie stuff but obviously 
not).

> readable string codes ('ALLOW', 'DENY', 'DEFER', 'REDIRECT'), and then 
> configured apache to register functions to wrap these unit-tested 
> handler objects, and to return apache codes instead of the strings.

Good idea.

> For the unit tests I wrote some mock mod_python request objects. So we 
> should be able to pin everything down now.

Yes not having that under unittest was definitely an issue. I think we 
can also address this by writing more web unit tests something I intend 
to spend some time doing.

> I will leave room for the tests to be refined and extended.
> 
> John.
> 
> PS Hope to commit things shortly......

Great.

~rufus

[snip]