Question

My requirement is ” Our users are Authenticated by External System using SSO”.
On successful authentication the external system returns header variables viz. userId,
firstName, lastName etc to our System.
Currently I am able to retrieve these header variables using
request.getHeader(“userId”) in my JSP page.

But I am using JSF 2.0 and not able to figure out as to how this can be done in JSF. I saw one example here on Stack overflow …

Map<String, String> requestHeaders = context.getExternalContext().getRequestHeaderMap(); 
String userName = requestHeaders.get(requestHeaderName); 

but there was no further response as how this will be invoked on the backing bean.

Any pointer or sample code would be helpful.

Answer 1

The context is here just the current instance of the FacesContext. This is a request based threadlocal variable which is always available throughout all the JSF code which is controlled by the FacesServlet.

FacesContext context = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
Map<String, String> requestHeaders = context.getExternalContext().getRequestHeaderMap(); 
String userName = requestHeaders.get(requestHeaderName); 
// ...

You can invoke this in for example the bean’s constructor, the bean’s @PostConstruct method, the bean’s action(listener) method, etcetera. The right place depends on the moment you want to collect this information and what you want to do with this information.