[Catalyst] Integrating with ASP.NET sessions and authentication

[Alejandro Imass]

Going out on a limb here but it's probable that the .NET apps are
authenticating to an Active Directory or Primary Domain Controller, a
Windoze domain in any case. They should offer the LDAP protocol and
you could use that for authentication.

Session management will occur at your Catalyst Server depending on the
Session handling mechanism used (derivatives of
Catalyst::Plugin::Session::Store). If you are using your database with
Catalyst::Plugin::Session::Store::DBIC (or Session::Store::DBI) you
may be able to share sessions with their .NET apps, if of course, you
are both able to store the session in a common database (unlikely).

In any case, you need to figure out how the ASP.NET apps are keeping
their sessions. Speculating, it is unlikely that the session info will
be compatible with the 2 platforms, especially on any extra-data that
apps may store in the sessions, because of the different serialization
schemes that may be used.

If you are using PostgreSql on your Catalyst Apps you may do some
magic with something like DBI Link which could help you integrate the
ASP.NET session handling mechanism  to a pgsql table and handle your
sessions directly from you Pg database with DBIC. Another option would
be to have some ASP.NET expert to write up the sync mechanism to a DB
table accessible by your Catalyst apps. A one-way session sync should
not be that hard, for example, from .NET to the DB where your Cat Apps
are running. The first step is finding out how the ASP.NET apps are
keeping their sessions. Maybe write your own
Catalyst::Plugin::Session::Store and have it work directly with the
.NET stuff ?

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 12:59 PM, Robert Mah<rmah at pobox.com> wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone has integrated a Catalyst application with
> ASP.NET session and authentication (for single sign-on if possible).
> My company recently go acquired and we've been told to integrate our
> systems with theirs (ASP.NET).  I know next to nothing about how .NET
> works and was hoping someone had already done the heavy lifting for me
> :-).
>
> Cheers,
> Rob
>
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