How to get all the LDAP groups for a particular user?

Question

I have a weblogic server using an external LDAP as Provider for authentication. I than need to recover the groups that a specific user has associated with in an LDAP repository.

The login uses standard java notation:

<form method="POST" action="j_security_check">
<p>Username: <input type="text" name="j_username"/></p>
<p>Password: <input type="password" name="j_password"/></p>
<input type="submit" value="Login"/>
</form>

And after the login I can recover the Princial using: <%= request.getUserPrincipal() %>

But What I need now is to recover all associated groups for this principal from LDAP? Is it possible?

[]s

Answer 1

It may not be possible to get a list of all groups without using LDAP. JAAS APIs generally give you a way to ask whether the user belongs to a certain group but not to get all groups at once.

The best you may be able to do without accessing LDAP directly is something like

for (String group : allGroups) { 
  if (request.isUserInRole(group)) { 
    userGroups.add(group);
  }
}

The performance hit should not be too bad if you do it once on session creation and then make userGroups session-scoped. (The container may well get all the groups on login.)