ColdFusion/Sharepoint Integration - Part 1 - Authenticating
Posted By : todd sharp Posted At : March 17, 2008 11:04 AM Posted In: Sharepoint, ColdFusion
22
I've been working a bit with Sharepoint lately for some team sites at work and needed a way to dynamically manage some user lists for a given site. Since Sharepoint has a pretty extensive API for interacting with the various bits I figured it would be pretty simple to create a scheduled task in ColdFusion that would pull a list of valid userid from my database and pass the list to Sharepoint to keep the authentication up to date without much intervention on my behalf.
Turns out it wasn't quite all that simple to even connect to the Sharepoint service. My attempts at setting/passing my NT credentials on the webservice call kept resulting in a 401 (Unauthorized) response from the service. Eventually I came across this post from Tom Jordahl that presented a fix. Let me quote Tom's post since he does a good job explaining:
Someone asked me how they could turn on NT Authentication for web service using Apache Axis (the web service used by ColdFusion). By default Axis uses its own HTTP client code, org.apache.axis.transport.http.HTTPSender, to send the XML/SOAP POST requests to a web service. This uses HTTP 1.0 and generally works file.Axis also supports the Jakarta Commons HTTPClient library, and has since 1.0. To configure Axis to use this instead of its own library you must edit the client-config.wsdd file used by Axis. It gets found on the classpath and generally you don't actually have one and the one built in to axis.jar gets used. The interesting line is the http transport. To switch Axis to use the HTTPClient jar, you would change this:
<transport name="http" pivot="java:org.apache.axis.transport.http.HTTPSender"></transport>To this:<transport name="http" pivot="java:org.apache.axis.transport.http.CommonsHTTPSender"></transport>Once you have this code configured, Axis will use the HTTPClient library for it HTTP needs. Since the HTTPClient library supports NT Authentication, you just set the username/password on the Stub object as you would normally do for (say) Basic Authentication and it will just work. If you are talking to a .NET web service, you are done.
So as he says, I made the change and "it just worked". I can now interact with the Sharepoint user service. Honestly, I haven't done a thing other then confirm that I can now authenticate at this point. Which is why I named this 'Part 1' - because I have a sinking suspicion that my journey to CF/Sharepoint enlightenment will have a few other bumps along the way.
As a side note, I am a bit unhappy that I had to mod the client-config.wsdd file to get this to work. If anyone knows of a simpler workaround please let me know.
<Cfset ws=createobject("webservice","http://websitename/sites/sitename/_vti_bin/lists.a...;)>
<Cfdump var="#ws#">
Did you try the url directly in your browser to make sure you can view the WSDL?
Did you restart CF after making the change to the config file?
From my desktop I do not have to authenticate in the browser. When I do it from the server (local admin logged in, CF running under with another domain users credentials), I do have to autheticate with my domain credentials.
I don't know how to make this authentication happen in my code. The examples I have seen set the username password AFTER creating the webservice. I can't get that far.
Check your email.
Todd
I don't know if you're still following this post or not, but I bet your problem is one that I was having earlier. If the WSDL is actually using NTLM then you can't authenticate against it and you can't get the stubs to generate. To solve the problem access the WSDL from your browser and save it into a folder on your webserver. Then point your CFObject call to the file you've saved on your server. This will let the stubs generate but since the WSDL came off the sharepoint server originally all the method calls will still go to sharepoint. (I can't remember whose blog I found this tidbit on but it sure does work).
Can you email me an example of your call to the service and the error that is being thrown?
Todd
http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/7/htmldocs/ww...
You mention getting success with the approach Tom offered, but it seems you had to (as he said) pass the username/password. What if we don't want to prompt the user for that (or retrieve it from somewhere we stored it for them)? Is there any way to pass it along on their behalf?
I've also asked on Tom's blog entry you point to, but I don't know if he'll respond.
Also, did you ever do a part 2? I couldn't find it.
Also, the next FAQU has my article on CF/SharePoint with some pretty detailed examples (which is essentially part 2 of my blog post). It got bumped from the last issue for some reason, but I'm 95% sure it'll be in the next one that's coming out soon.
Could you or jenn post (or email) some more tips on how you guys got this working? It would be a life saver!
I'd be glad to give you some more help...
I was going to try and email you, but you're address isn't in the post that I see. If you want to send me a line at jdodson@pioneerservices.com feel free. If you include in the email what errors (if any) you're getting that would also be helpful. This project was one of the most frustrating I've ever done so I'd like to save someone else some of the steps.
There is so little info on the internet about this, I will try and ask you my question right here.
I have a little colfusion page that I view through a Page Viewer Webpart in Sharepoint. The only thing I want from sharepoint is the logged in user. I found bits of code to get that, but it's always from .NET, I don't know how to do the same thing with Coldfusion. Any ideas?
Thanks,
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion9/
Good luck!