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Most of the variables created by the SP are controlled by you, and correspond to mapped attributes. A few are built into the SP and can't be renamed. Currently these are hardwired but in a future version most of them will be produced through the use of the recently introduced attribute extractor of type "Assertion". The built-in variables can be disabled (to avoid duplication with the extractor) with the content setting of exportStdVars="false".

Variable	Meaning
Shib-Application-ID	The `applicationId` property derived for the request.
Shib-Session-ID	The internal session key assigned to the session associated with the request.
Shib-Identity-Provider	The entityID of the IdP that authenticated the user associated with the request.
Shib-Authentication-Instant	The ISO timestamp provided by the IdP indicating the time of authentication.
Shib-Authentication-Method	The `AuthenticationMethod` or `<AuthnContextClassRef>` value supplied by the IdP, if any.
Shib-AuthnContext-Class	The `AuthenticationMethod` or `<AuthnContextClassRef>` value supplied by the IdP, if any.
Shib-AuthnContext-Decl	The `<AuthnContextDeclRef>` value supplied by the IdP, if any.
Shib-Handler^2.6	The self-referential base location of the SP's "handlers" for use by applications in requesting login, logout, etc.

Tool-Specific Examples

Expand

	Java
	Java

Code Block

title	Java Environment Access

request.getAttribute("Shib-Identity-Provider")

Code Block

title	Java Header Access

request.getHeader("Shib-Identity-Provider")

Warning

title	Struts 2 Issue

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");

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Expand

	ASP.NET
	ASP.NET

Code Block

title	ASP.NET Header Access

Request.Headers("Shib-Identity-Provider")

Expand

title	Ruby on Rails

Code Block

title	Ruby on Rails Environment Access

request.env["Shib-Identity-Provider"]

Code Block

title	Ruby on Rails Header Access

request.headers[:HTTP_SHIB_IDENTITY_PROVIDER]

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Tool-Specific Examples