1)createUser() 2)addUsertoGroup()... group permissions not applied immediately

Dear Gallery Developers,

Thank you very much for taking the time to write such a slick API for integrating/embedding Gallery into other uses. I am very impressed.

I have been experiencing a minor glitch in my integration attempt that I hope others might be able to help me with.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my integration is very minimal, I just want to authenticate against a radius server instead of using gallery's authentication system. I have elected for on-the-fly registration because only a small subset of the thousands in the radius database will use the software, and because the actual radius server is not under my control, so I can't add event-driven hooks to it. Specifically though, I want to add users authenticated by this module to specific groups based on a variable I send to my gallery wrapper.

The addusertogroup() and createuser() functions work wonderfully (when I go and check the database I see that these users have been created and have been added to the proper groups). However, the first time the user logs in (and hence, their account is created on the fly) gallery behaves as if they weren't a member of the group. For example, one of my groups is "trico" and I have an album that is set only to be viewable by people in that group. After logging in for the first time, a person who should have been added to that group on the fly does not see the gallery. However, after clicking refresh (and thus starting a new init session that this time actually will work because the user has been created) the gallery shows up and the group permissions behave normally. It is just that initial login that is a problem. Since I have to support a relatively un-savvy user base, this will really confuse them. I could just write a refresh into the outputed html, but I would love to find a more elegant solution.

So, are some snippets of my code, the majority of it taken from the documentation:

//This is our authentication
...
if(!haverAuthenticate($h_user,$h_password,$h_college))
	die ('Bad Username or Password');
...
//This is the Gallery Part
require_once('./gallery2/embed.php');
$g2Uri='/gallery2/';
$embedUri='/haverentry2.php';
$h_loginPage='/gallery-entry/login.php';

 $ret = GalleryEmbed::init(array('embedUri' => $embedUri, 'g2Uri' => $g2Uri, 'activeUserId' => $h_user, 'loginRedirect' => $h_loginPage));
 GalleryCapabilities::set('login', true);
 if ($ret) {
     /* Error! */
     /* Did we get an error because the user doesn't exist in g2 yet? */
     $ret2 = GalleryEmbed::isExternalIdMapped($h_user, 'GalleryUser');
     if ($ret2 && $ret2->getErrorCode='ERROR_MISSING_OBJECT') {
         /* The user does not exist in G2 yet. Create in now on-the-fly */
         $ret = GalleryEmbed::createUser($h_user, array('username' => $h_user));
         //Add users from the colleges to their various groups, all get added to trico
         switch($h_college)
         {
         	case "a":
         		GalleryEmbed::addUserToGroup($h_user,"grp_a");
         		GalleryEmbed::addUserToGroup($h_user,"grp_trico");
				break;         
         	case "b":
         		GalleryEmbed::addUserToGroup($h_user,"grp_b");
         		GalleryEmbed::addUserToGroup($h_user,"grp_trico");
				break;         
         	case "c":
         		GalleryEmbed::addUserToGroup($h_user,"grp_trico");
         		GalleryEmbed::addUserToGroup($h_user,"grp_c");
				break;         
         	default:
          		//gets added to no groups
         
...

         $ret3 = GalleryEmbed::login($h_user);
...
 $g2moddata = GalleryEmbed::handleRequest();

Thank you in advance for any help you could provide.
- Geddes

Thanks for your post valiant. As I've been searching through these forums I have noticed that you help a lot of people and really go the extra mile to solve a lot of problems.

I tried what you said - I added error checking with the if($ret) stuff and no errors are returned, everything seems to work fine, except that the sub-albums for which the new user has permissions to see don't show up until the second login. I think I am already using the non-transactional driver. Here is my config.php:

 * The possible database types are:
 *  mysql        Standard MySQL
 *  mysqlt       MySQL with transactions (3.23.34a and newer)
 *  postgres     PostgreSQL 6.x (not rigorously tested)
 *  postgres7    PostgreSQL 7.x
 *  oci8po       Oracle (9i and newer)
 *  db2          (EXPERIMENTAL!) IBM DB2 for Linux/UNIX/Windows, v8.2.2
 */
$storeConfig['type'] = 'mysql';
$storeConfig['hostname'] = 'localhost';
$storeConfig['database'] = 'g2dev1';
$storeConfig['username'] = '*******';
$storeConfig['password'] = '*******';
$storeConfig['tablePrefix'] = 'g2_';
$storeConfig['columnPrefix'] = 'g_';
$storeConfig['usePersistentConnections'] = false;
$gallery->setConfig('storage.config', $storeConfig);

Just in case I tried changing the driver to mysqlt but experienced the same result.

I think I might just be mis-understanding the api functions. Looking at the code, I think this is sort of what gallery tries to do:

1. init() with a (to gallery) unknown user-id. This returns an error in $ret so
2. createuser() and addusertogroup() and login()
3. print html

My theory is that the init call is giving the html of a guest because the initial userid was bad in the init() call. However, init() can not be called more than once - so how can I force gallery to re-init() once the userid has been created on the fly?

Does that make sense? Thanks again for your help,
- Geddes

I think what i had to do was if i created the user and added them to a group, i would then do a header("Refresh: 0; url=blahblah"); to refresh the page and everything seems to work pretty good that way.
Steve Lineberry

Wow, is that bizarre... Thanks for figuring this out!