Providing Personalization With User Profile Attributes Globally

Web agents in Policy Agent 3.0 have the ability to forward user profile attribute values via HTTP headers to end-web applications. The user profile attribute values come from the server side of OpenSSO Enterprise. The web agent behaves like a broker to obtain and relay user attribute values to the destination servlets, CGI scripts, or ASP pages. These applications can in turn use the attribute values to personalize page content.

This feature is configurable through two web agent properties. To turn this feature on and off, edit the property labeled Profile Attribute Fetch Mode (Tab: Application, Name: com.sun.identity.agents.config.profile.attribute.fetch.mode)

This property can be set to one of the following values:

• NONE

• HTTP_HEADER

• HTTP_COOKIE

When set to NONE, the web agent does not fetch LDAP attributes from the server and ignores the web agent property labeled Profile Attribute Map (Tab: Application, Name: com.sun.identity.agents.config.profile.attribute.mapping). In the other two cases, the web agent fetches the attribute.

To configure the attributes that are to be forwarded in the HTTP headers, use the Profile Attribute Map property.

By default, some LDAP user attribute names and HTTP header names are set to sample values.

To find the appropriate LDAP user attribute names, check the following XML file on the machine where OpenSSO Enterprise is installed: amUser.xml

The amUser.xml file is available from the directory within which the opensso.war file is deployed. This directory varies according to the web container. The following is an example of a possible location:

OpenSSO-Deploy-base/WEB-INF/classes/amUser.xml

The attributes in this file could be either OpenSSO Enterprise user attributes or OpenSSO Enterprise dynamic attributes. For an explanation of these two types of user attributes, see Sun OpenSSO Enterprise 8.0 Administration Guide

The attribute and HTTP header names that need to be forwarded must be determined by the end-user applications on the deployment container that the web agent is protecting. Basically, these applications are the consumers of the forwarded header values (the forwarded information is used for the customization and personalization of web pages).