[QGIS-Developer] proxy authentication using auth database not working

[Christian Beer]

Hello,

I came across a strange behavior with qgis while using our corporate proxy.

We are using a proxy (http and https) that requires authentication to access the Internet. I configured QGIS to use the proxy in the general network settings and saved the authentication info (username/password) into the auth database. There are two other authentication settings for external WMS content that is only reachable through the Internet (via said proxy) in the auth database. Whenever QGIS starts it asks for a username and password to access the Internet although this information is already stored in the auth database. When I enter the correct proxy credentials the external WFS content is shown and I can see the stored configurations in the options dialog. When I don't enter the proxy credentials or choose to skip the initial question for credentials (there is an option to skip for 10 seconds) the external content (WFS and News Feed) is not shown and the content of the authentication database is also not shown in the options dialog. When editing the external WMS layer qgis tells me that the configuration is missing. Restarting and entering the correct credentials then works again.

Several questions here: Why is there a prompt for the proxy credentials when they are part of the authentication database? Why is the authdb not loaded when I skip the proxy credentials prompt? Note that it is not asking for the master password. It is specifically asking for the proxy credentials.

I specifically added the proxy credentials to the auth db so the user does not have to enter them everytime qgis starts. We noticed this behavior in different versions. The latest being 3.16. Since we recently had a problem accessing the external WMS content I updated to 3.22.4 which helped me solve the problem with SSL certificates. So kudos to the extra error message about a missing root CA certificate in 3.22 that helped me out a lot. But unfortunately the proxy problem described above is still present.

This is also available as a (older) github issue with steps to reproduce and versions tested: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues/46216

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MfG
Christian Beer