[dev] Identity drivers

[Jan Schneider]

Zitat von Richard Wallace <rwallace at thewallacepack.net>:

> I'm working on creating a custom Identity driver for our system.  We
> could use the $type parameter to Identity::singleton() to have it create
> an application specific instance of the identity, but the identity
> itself is going to be used across multiple applications and they
> shouldn't need to know about the application itself.  It also seems like
> it would be awkward to have them lookup in the configuration what type
> of Identity object they should be using.
>
> So, I'd like to modify the way the singleton() method works to find the
> Identity object in the configuration.  This isn't a problem.  What is
> (or could be) a problem is that there is one Identity object per user.
> At first glance this makes sense, but when you start thinking about
> having a LDAP or SQL backend Identity (and a composite cause we'll
> actually be using both as sources), you're talking about having one
> connection to the backend per user you want to lookup.  Sure, you could
> try and do a persistent connection for SQL, but I don't think that
> really addresses the issue.

What is so bad about this? We do this all the time with a lot of data we use
in Horde. If you want to optimize it, you can store the Identity instance in
the session or in a cache and let singleton() look in the session data
before it creates a new Identity object.

> So, I'm trying to figure out the best way to go about this.  Right now
> I'm leaning towards the way the Auth class gets its configuration data.
>   The dev calls Identity::singleton($conf['identity']['driver']) and
> possibly the $params.  If the $params are not passed then they are
> looked up with Horde::getDriverConfig().

Not sure what this has to do with the SQL/LDAP connections, and what I read
from your first paragraph you want to avoid changing all singleton() calls.

> Is this the best way to do this and would you guys be interested in me
> committing these changes to Horde?

I don't see us having more than the default identity driver anytime soon, so
I'm not sure if it's worth the effort. OTOH, we are prepared for new drivers
without breaking BC if we include the driver name in the singleton() calls.
I guess I would accept a clean patch.

Jan.

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