[GIS] How to access an wms layer that requires authorization via OpenLayers

javajavascriptopenlayers-2wms

Is there a way to send username and password parameter to a wms layer that needs authorization?

If not, I guess it's perhaps a non-spatial thing to solve so that you before the javascript sends a wms request you initiate a httprequest to the server where the wms service is hosted. If anyone have an good example of how to do that from java, html or javascript I would really appreciate it.

If you use firefox you could add http:\username:password@wmsurl and its solved and the information is the stored in the session/cache …

Thanks for the help
Mike

Best Answer

It's not the work of WMS server that do the authorization, but the HTTP server. Usually we save logged in user's information in the sessions and provide those information when requesting to a WMS server in the cookies.

Related Solutions

[GIS] Prevent OpenLayers WMS layer cache by browser

The trick of using the "myData" parameter should be unnessesarry, as we see in the OpenLayers.Layer.HTTPRequest (which the WMS layer inherits from):

redraw: function(force) { 
    if (force) {
        return this.mergeNewParams({"_olSalt": Math.random()});
    } else {
        return OpenLayers.Layer.prototype.redraw.apply(this, []);
    }
},

if you do layer.redraw(true); OpenLayers adds a random parameter for you

(besides, setting myData to Math.random() on initialization will not change myData for each update)

OpenLayers Authentication – Using HTTP Basic Authentication with OpenLayers

The solution we ended up with was to add an authenticating proxy server between the OpenLayers client and the backend WMS service. So instead of connecting directly to the WMS service the OpenLayers client connects to a proxy server which adds the required authentication headers to the requests.

Example code for creating the layers:

var layer = new OpenLayers.Layer.WMS( "background", "http://myproxyaddress.com/23ergwe435dw3463", {layers: 'basic'} );

Example Apache proxy configuration:

ProxyRequests     Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
SSLProxyEngine On
<Proxy *>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
</Proxy>
SetEnvIf Request_URI "23ergwe435dw3463" wms_provider_name
RequestHeader set Authorization: "Basic Xk12BLdVNzUo5UGl0po5Y" env=wms_provider_name
ProxyPass         /23ergwe435dw3463  https://wmsprovideraddress.com
ProxyPassReverse  /23ergwe435dw3463  https://wmsprovideraddress.com

You can have multiple proxy configurations using this style.

What you should put inside the Authorization quotes is just the base-64 encoding of the string "username:password" (without the quotes). For more information see this link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/567814/apache2-reverse-proxy-to-an-end-point-that-requires-basicauth-but-want-to-hide-t

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[GIS] Prevent OpenLayers WMS layer cache by browser

OpenLayers Authentication – Using HTTP Basic Authentication with OpenLayers

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