Signing In Through the Web Server

This section provides a step-by-step example of the steps that occur within the system after you have it configured to trust authentication performed at the web server level:

Step	Component	Description
1	Browser	The user clicks a link to the PeopleSoft application, for example http://serverXYZ/servlets/psportal/peoplesoft8/?cmd=start.
2	Web server	The web server receives the request for the uniform resource locator, authenticates the user, and adds the user ID to the HTTP request for the resource. The method the system uses to authenticate the user and the method the web server uses to add the user ID to the HTTP request depends on your implementation. For example, it could be a third-party web single signon or authorization solution, a PKI/ digital certificate, or SSL/TLS with client-side authentication.
3	Servlet	The PeopleSoft servlet receives the HTTP request, which includes the user ID in a header, cookie, or form field, and connects to the application server using the public user ID and password from the web profile.
4	Application server	The application server authenticates the connection from the web server by checking the public access user ID and password against the values stored in PSOPRDEFN. The user ID and password must be valid for the connection to succeed and for Signon PeopleCode to run. Note: The password verification prevents a sophisticated hacker from connecting to the application server directly and carrying out service requests.
5	Signon PeopleCode	Signon PeopleCode runs, under the context of the signon_peoplecode_user, with all the permissions of this user. It grabs the "real" user ID from the HTTP request and creates a copy of the user profile in the local database (if appropriate). It also calls the PeopleCode built-in SetAuthenticationResult and passes the user ID, and an AuthResult of "true." The PeopleCode program always passes "true" for AuthResult because the application server is "trusting" the authentication logic of the web server. The Pure Internet Architecture session is set to the user ID of whatever you pass into SetAuthenticationResult. For example: SetAuthenticationResult(True, "TSAWYER"," ", False); In this case, the system sets the session to TSAWYER. The user can access all the pages to which TSAWYER has access.