Integration of Spring Security into Grails – plugin approach 1

This blog post describes problems and challenges when porting Stephan February’s solution from acegi security and acegiSecurityPlugin 0.3 to acegiSecurityPlugin 0.5.1 and Spring Security 2.0.5.

One issue was the fact that the whole API names changed from acegi security to spring security and that few api calls changed. Also the libraries had to be changed to work with Spring Security 2.0.5. In this case the grails maven project of the “Spring Way” mentioned before was of great help because maven’s calculated dependencies could simply be copied to the plugin. In this way all Java method.invocation errors went away magically . Regrettably the domain classes of Stephan’s solution could not be used any further because the whole schema had changed from Acegi security to Spring Security. That is why I decided to continue the usage of the standard JDBCMutableAclService of Spring in combination with a simple Spring bean which controls the deletion and creation of schemata with plain SQL commands.

Apart from these issues I learned to work with the Grails plugin and the Spring Security API and digged deeper into interceptor technology, expando meta classes, the Grails Bean Builder DSL and Spring Security as a whole.

I already mentioned that our Image Site makes use of very fine grained permission control for which reason it was not acceptable to us that Stephan’s solution did not support applying ACLs (Access Control Lists) to method parameters. For example this could turn out to be very useful if a user wants to delete an image and the deletion method is able to check whether the user has the correct permission on the given image object. This is the reason why I tried to implement applying ACLs to method parameters. Details of the implementation and arising problems will be subject to my next blog post.

Regards,
Phillip

Jump to other parts of this series:

• Integration of Spring Security into Grails – plugin approach 3
• Integration of Spring Security into Grails – plugin approach 2
• Integration of Spring Security into Grails – plugin approach 1
• Integration of Spring Security into Grails – Spring approach
• The Decision

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