WebScripts authorization & design

[alrice]

I am using the WebScripts feature in 2.1 and I am finding it's very nicely designed and easy to understand. I am implementing some public application forms and survey forms. The responses will get saved into Alfresco into a Drop Zone kind of space. However these are public forms and I would prefer not to bother the visitors to login as guest. If i set the WebScripts to use authentication none, then the roothome and companyhome objects are not available, and thus it's not possible to get a node reference for uploading content into Alfresco. What is recommended? Seems to me the choices are:

a) Automatically sign the user on as guest : guest and run the webscript authentication as guest . and if so, how is that done to automatically sign the visitor on? Maybe there is a client side trick with javascript that can be done if there is nothing on the Alf side to do  it?
b) Run the webscript as authentication none in which case I believe it's impossible to save content to the cms, correct?

Thanks for any advice you are able to provide on this design question.
Alex Rice
alexr@santafe.edu

[davidc]

Set <authentication>guest</authenticaton> in your public web script *.desc.xml files.

Then, when invoking a web script url, add the guest=true url argument.

All items within the repository that need to be read or updated must have guest permissions assigned.

<authentication>none</authentication> means the web script cannot do anything with the repository that requires user authentication.  It's useful when rendering non-repository data backed responses.

[alrice]

David, thank you very much. I see now. The guest=true works. Question- it doesn't seem to work with POSTs, just GETs. However, I am cheating and put it on the ACTION as a url argument like this. Is this cheating? will it work with most browsers do you think?

<form action="${url.service}?guest=true"
   method="post"
   enctype="multipart/form-data" id="form1"
   charset="utf-8">
…

Thanks again
Alex Rice

[workingpeter]

Accessing roothome as guest does not appear to be working under 2.9 Labs version. Requesting a script as guest that uses roothome results in error message "roothome is not defined".

The same script does work under Community version 2.1.0.

[davidc]

Ok, we'll take a look. Thanks.