Question

I’m new to Spring, so this question may look like so obvious.

I’m trying to implement Spring security and my requirement is to authenticate the user name/password against a LDAP server and once the user is authenticated, I need to retrieve the user roles from a relational database.

is it possible to do this in Spring security?

Answer 1

Yes.

The build-in ldap authentication manager splits the authentication and authorisation of a user into 2 parts
You can configure a LDAP based authentiication manager like below.

<bean id="authenticationManager" class="org.acegisecurity.providers.ProviderManager">
    <property name="providers">
        <list>
            <ref local="ldapAuthenticationProvider"/>
        </list>
    </property> 
</bean>

The authentication provider is configured like this.

<bean id="ldapAuthenticationProvider" class="org.acegisecurity.providers.ldap.LdapAuthenticationProvider">
    <constructor-arg><ref local="authenticator"/></constructor-arg>
    <constructor-arg><ref local="populator"/></constructor-arg>
    <property name="userCache"><ref local="userCache"/></property>
</bean>

I don’t know if there’s a built-in populator that will do what you want, but you can develop your own one if required.