| Code Block |
|---|
| title | Java Environment Access |
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| request.getAttribute("Shib-Identity-Provider") |
| Code Block |
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| request.getHeader("Shib-Identity-Provider") |
| Warning |
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| An issue has been identified using environment variable access using Struts 2. When accessing a request attribute whose name contains a hyphen, and the attribute does not exist in the session, rather than returning a null value the Struts environment returns an instance of java.math.BigDecimal with the value '0'. This is related to Struts use of a wrapped servlet request and evaluation of the attribute name as an OGNL expression. Applications retrieving attribute data within this framework should take care to check the return value of request.getAttribute(name) for attribute names containing a hyphen. This affects all the custom SP variables noted above as well as certain default attribute names such as 'persistent-id'. |
Shibboleth attributes are by default UTF-8 encoded. However, depending on the servlet contaner configuration they are interpreted as ISO-8859-1 values. This causes problems with non-ASCII characters. The solution is to re-encode attributes, e.g. with: String value= request.getHeader("givenName");
value= new String( value.getBytes("ISO-8859-1"), "UTF-8"); |