JDBC Realms in Tomcat 6

Question

I have a few questions for you all. I don't know if this is the correct place to post this... I have been trying like a mad man to get JDBCrealms to work, but to no avail. I have sank into the tomcat documentation and also have an O'Reilly book here on tomcat. The book pretty much says the same thing as the Tomcat doc's. *(Thanks O'R.)*
What I am trying to do is use tomcats security to allow different users (with different roles) to login through a form to some JSP's that I have built. What the user can see / do will vary depending on their role. If anyone can give me a hand on this I'd appreciate it, if this is not the correct place to post this, can someone point me to the right place? I'm not finding too many forums on apache tomcat out there.

Answer 1

Thanks for the quick response. I didn't want to waste time and keystrokes, bandwidth, or database space if this was the wrong place to ask about tomcat and stuff.
Ok, there actually are a NUMBER of issues I am having. First one's first. Can I use the tomcat JDBCRealms to login to the software via a form login? Secondly, I am having some issues on setting up a realm. I've been over and over the tomcat docs and also an O'Reilly book here and it basically says the same thing. It SEEMS it should be straight forward, but I must be missing something.
Here is a snippet of my web.xml file (the portion that deals with what I need):
<welcome-file-list>
<welcome-file>Login.jsp</welcome-file>
     </welcome-file-list>
     <security-constraint>
     <web-resource-collection>
          <web-resource-name>my project name</web-resource-name>
          <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
          <http-method>DELETE</http-method>
          <http-method>GET</http-method>
          <http-method>POST</http-method>
          <http-method>PUT</http-method>
     </web-resource-collection>
     <auth-constraint>
          <role-name>admin</role-name>
          <role-name>user</role-name>
          <role-name>manager</role-name>
          <role-name>trainer</role-name>
     </auth-constraint>
     </security-constraint>
     <login-config>
     <auth-method>FORM</auth-method>
     <realm-name>Training</realm-name>
     <form-login-config>
          <form-login-page>/Login.jsp</form-login-page>
          <form-error-page>/Login.jsp</form-error-page>
     </form-login-config>
     </login-config>
     <security-role>
     <role-name>manager</role-name>
     </security-role>
     <security-role>
     <role-name>user</role-name>
     </security-role>
     <security-role>
     <role-name>admin</role-name>
     </security-role>
     <security-role>
     <role-name>trainer</role-name>
     </security-role>
Here is my server.xml file snippet:
<Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.JDBCRealm" debug="0"
driverName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
connectionURL="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/<myDBname>"
connectionName="secret"
connectionPassword="endeavor"
userTable="tcuser" userNameCol="tcuser_name" userCredCol="password"
userRoleTable="tcrole" roleNameCol="tcrole_name" />
I have been getting a number of errors the first one that is most common is the j_security_check is unavailable.
the Login.jsp calls j_security_check when the submit button is pressed. The database connection works because without the realm, I am able to run the other JSP's and edit / update / display / (your basic very flexible CRUD). I have two tables defined in the database setup as how tomcat suggests them to be except no PK definitions on the two tables (I really do not think that is the issue) I guess one of my first questions is: Does the web.xml snippet look correct? What about the server.xml snippet?
Do you have to place any extra .jar files into the lib directory of tomcat or should the appropriate jar files already be there ready to go? Do I have to make any special calls to invoke the j_security_check or should all I have to do is call it in the action="" parameter of the form?
Another thing that might be related is that I am running Enfinity Suite (Eclipse on roids) to build these jsp's, I'm just not using any of the custom functionality. I set a new instance of tomcat up as to not use the studio's customized tomcat. I noticed that there are 2 web.xml files. One in the WEB-INF folder of the project and one in the CATALINA_HOME/conf/directory. Also I have read that there should be a context.xml file in the META-INF folder of the project? I'm very sorry to dump what seems to be basic questions about this on to you all, but I am completely lost on this. Thanks in advance to everyone.
warmest regards,
Josh
Edited by: TheWhiteKnight on Jul 8, 2008 6:43 PM