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Spring Web Flow and Acegi

Posted on | 17 August 2007 | 2 Comments
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Last night, I attended a workshop on Spring Web Flow and Acegi, presented by Marten Deinum of Conspect.

Spring Web Flow
Spring Web Flow (SWF) is a controller framework that allows you to define flows that span across multiple page hits, in a wizard-type fashion. Done declaratively in a structured xml configuration file, Spring Web Flow simplifies flow definitions in Spring MVC. It replaces the definition of flows previously in code that extends AbstractWizardFormController. The extra layer of abstraction allows the flow definitions to be modulized and reusable. A flow is made up of actions, views, decision points, and subflows, which allows flows to be triggered by other flows.

Securing Web Spring Flow with Acegi
Acegi is a security system for Spring. It provides authentication, role-based authorization, and much more.
To bridge the two systems, FlowSecurityInterceptor was created. It extends AbstractSecurityInterceptor (Acegi) and implements FlowExecutionListener (SWF). A FlowSecurityInterceptor can be configured to map flows, flow events and states to predefined roles in Acegi. It plugs into the web flow by inserting itself into the execution flow.

The slides for this presentation can be found here (pdf, Dutch).

References:
http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/spring/browse/SWF-93
http://blog.arendsen.net/index.php/2007/02/08/securing-spring-webflow-flows-in-under-500-lines-of-code
http://www.ervacon.com/products/swf/intro/index.html
http://www.springframework.org/webflow
http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/07/spring-web-flow
http://www.acegisecurity.org

Comments

2 Responses to “Spring Web Flow and Acegi”

  1. Leena Bora
    April 2nd, 2008 @ 07:02

    Hello sir,

    In my application I’m trying to secure the web-flows using ACEGI. Your artical helped me to get the direction on this.

    The interceptor for the flows, “FlowSecurityInterceptor” is in the package:
    “org.springframework.webflow.security” . But in the spring-webflow jar I could not find the security package.

    Can you please help in knowing from where can I get the binaries for the same so that I can use in my application.

    Regards,
    Leena

  2. Clara Ko
    April 2nd, 2008 @ 10:50

    Dear Leena,

    Please ask your question on the Spring Forum at http://forum.springframework.org/.

    They will help you there.

    Clara

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