[mapserver-dev] Call for comments - RFC 42 HTTP Cookie Forwarding

[Julien-Samuel Lacroix]

Hi,

There have been some discussion about this on IRC. I'll try to summarise 
what have been said. Please correct me if I forget something or if I'm 
wrong.

Please also add your own comment.

- Cookie passing should be done by the webserver, but since we connect 
directly to a WMS server we have to handle it in MapServer.

- There's no mention of encoding in the RFC. I should add a mention to 
warn MapScript users that they should encode their end-of-line and 
double-quote characters to make sure they don't screw up their mapfile 
when saving it on disc. For a CGI request, it shouldn't be a problem 
since we don't save the file after we set the cookie. Is that enough?

- Putting processing values in a metadata (http_cookie_data) may be 
going to far. The other alternative would be to add a mapfile 
configuration parameter called HTTPCOOKIE that would be used to store 
the cookie data. I would like to hear from others on that specific point?

Julien


Julien-Samuel Lacroix wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We had a request to add HTTP Cookie forwarding support in MapServer for 
> WMS/WFS layers. This would allow us to support Cookie base 
> authentication that are present in certain WMS/WFS server environment.
> 
> These are simple and non-disruptive changes. Note that MapServer already 
> read the HTTP Cookie and store them in the cgiRequestObj like they were 
> GET or POST parameters.
> 
> Can you please take a look at:
> 
> http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-42
> 
> Julien
> 

-- 
Julien-Samuel Lacroix
Mapgears
http://www.mapgears.com/