Affiliation Request

Affiliations, along with other data, are returned in response to a validate request. There is one parameter to the validate request, ticketid, the value of the ticket string sent by the user.

The affiliation request URI will look something like this:

https://wind.columbia.edu/validate?ticketid=TICKETID_TO_BE_VALIDATED

response

When WIND is configured to send affiliations to a specific application, the response to a successful validate request from that application contains an additional element, a <wind:affiliations>. The <wind:serviceResponse> will have a <wind:authenticationSuccess> element containing a <wind:user> element with the username. This will be followed by the list of affiliations, if any, for the user within a <wind:affiliations> element. On failure, the response will be identical to the standard validate failure.

WIND also supports a plain-text format for validate responses for services configured to receive affiliations. WIND returns either "yes" followed by a carriage return and the UNI or anonymous WIND identifier, or "no". If the reponse is "yes", the UNI or anonymous identifier is followed by list of affiliations, one to a line.

Below is a sample valid XML response from WIND to a request for affiliations for a user:

          
          <wind:serviceResponse xmlns:wind='http://www.columbia.edu/acis/rad/authmethods/wind'>
            <wind:authenticationSuccess>
              <wind:user>UNI</wind:user>
              <wind:affiliations>
                <wind:affil>affil1</wind:affil>
                <wind:affil>affil2</wind:affil>
                <wind:affil>affil3</wind:affil>
              </wind:affiliations>
              <wind:passwordtyped>true</wind:passwordtyped>
              <wind:logintime>1078117200</wind:logintime>
              <wind:passwordtime>1072933200</wind:passwordtime>
              <wind:passwordchangeURI>
                https://www1.columbia.edu/sec/acis/manageaccount/passwd.html
              </wind:passwordchangeURI>
            </wind:authenticationSuccess>
          </wind:serviceResponse>
          
        

The same response from WIND in plain-text format:

          
          yes
          UNI
          affil1
          affil2
          affil3
          
        

In the above examples, WIND has returned "yes" (this is a valid ticket), "UNI" (the UNI), and a newline-separated list of affiliations.

sample client code (parsing the XML response)

          
  #
  # Ticket validation and affils parsing subroutine
  #
  # $affiliationURI = 'https://wind.columbia.edu/validate?ticketid=';
  # 
  sub ticketAffils {
      use LWP::Simple 'get';
      use XML::Simple;
      my $ticketId = shift;
      my $windResponse;
      $windResponse = LWP::Simple::get($affiliationURI.$ticketId);
      my $ref = XMLin($windResponse);
      if (exists $ref->{'wind:authenticationSuccess'}) {
        my $username = $ref->{'wind:authenticationSuccess'}{'wind:user'};
        if (exists $ref->{'wind:authenticationSuccess'}{'wind:affiliations'}) {
          my @affils = values %{$ref->{'wind:authenticationSuccess'}{'wind:affiliations'};
          foreach my $aff (@affils) {
            print "$aff\n";
          }
        }
        else {
          print "no affiliations returned for $username.\n";
        }
      } elsif (exists $ref->{'wind:authenticationFailure'}){
          # Ticket rejected. User should have an option to try again.
          # To try again, another authentication request needs to be generated.
          print "the ticket was already used or was invalid";
      } else {
          # Unexpected response
          print "did not receive an expected response";
      }
  }
          
        

The Perl code fragment above shows how an application might obtain the list of affiliations for a ticketid from an XML-format response.