Question

I have multiple projects that need to pass user login information to common-api project that they call. The common-api does not have user credentials passed in via method calls, so I am hoping to make this information available via Threadlocal variables.

The first such project that needs to make this information available is a rest-web-service-api project that uses Spring Security, and sits on top of my common-api project.

I see that Spring Security stores the user information in a ThreadLocal variable… is there a way to access this from the common-api project without necessarily needing to know that Spring Security is who set it? I am quite unfamiliar with Spring Security and new to using Threadlocals so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Posting my own solution here in case it’s useful down the road to someone else.

Spring security (by default) does in fact store the user information in a Threadlocal variable, but the common-api will not have access to it unless it adds a spring-security dependency -if it does, the user information can be accessed (assuming you’re executing in the same thread) using the following snippet:

SecurityContext secureContext = SecurityContextHolder.getContext();
Authentication auth = secureContext.getAuthentication();
Object principal = auth.getPrincipal();

String userName = null;
if (principal instanceof UserDetails) {
    UserDetails userDetails = (UserDetails) principal;
    userName = userDetails.getUsername();
} else {
    userName = principal.toString();
}

The solution I implemented was different however, because I did not want to introduce Spring Security to the common-api project, and I couldn’t always rely on Spring Security being in the user of the API. So, I created a Singleton bean in the common-api that contains my own defined ThreadLocal variables that can be set from other projects and accessed from the common-api project (again, assuming they’re running in the same thread).

Code Snippet:

public class CommonAPIThreadLocalStorageManager {
    private static CommonAPIThreadLocalStorageManager instance;

    // Typical singleton private constructor, static getInstance here

    private ThreadLocal<String> userID = new ThreadLocal<String>();

    public String getUserID() {
        return userID.get();
    }

    public void setUserID(String userID) {
        this.userID.set(userID);
    }