External authentication and shared accounts

[adrian_s]

While integrating my application with Alfresco via external authentication subsystem I've noticed that I cannot create a a password for a user if:

<ol>
<li>This user did not exist in Alfresco</li>
<li>This user was logged in to Alfresco via external authentication subsystem (X-Alfresco-Remote-User HTTP Header)</li>
</ol>

In that case when I log in to Alfresco as admin user and go to "Manage System Users" page I can see that this user is already created in Alfresco. The problem is that I cannot set a password for this user in order for him to be able to log in to Alfresco directly without using the External SSO method.

My use case is that I want my application to make changes to documents stored in Alfresco via CMIS using External authentication. But also I would like to allow users of my application to log in directly to Alfresco and work with their documents.

Also I've noticed that if the account was created in Alfresco first and then used with External authentication - both Alfresco NTLM and External methods work fine.

So is there a way to create a password for remote user account in Alfresco in order for them to use native Alfresco's login page?

Will appreciate any ideas.
Thanks in advance,
Adrian

[bdaniel]

Hi there, its good to hear you have External authentication working on Alfresco 5.  Would you mind sharing how you went about achieving that?

When I had this working in Alfresco 4 I used to create some properties for new users as follows:

What you need is a json array of user properties like userName, firstName, lastName, email, password to use with the alfresco/service/api/people service to create the new user with these properties populated.

Hope that helps.