How to send a username between web service requests?

Question

Basically the problem is this:
There is a stored database procedure that takes a username as an argument and produces some XML data depending on it. It is called by a method with no arguments in an unsecured web service (let's call that web service WSA). There is also another web service (let's call it WSB) which is supposed to call WSA. In this setup, WSA should only ever be called by WSB and never by anyone else. WSB is what users call and it is the way they get the required XML data. The web services are deployed on OC4J, and they have security enabled on them. WSB is secured by OC4J and is accessed by providing the username and password of an OC4J user.
When testing a web service, OC4J provides you with a form where you can enter login information prior to invoking a web service. If you select to include security info in the header and preview the message before invoking the service, the username and password are in the message.
My problem is that I can't get the security information (or at least the username) to reach the endpoint implementation and invocation of the stored procedure. So far I have created WSA, made a web service proxy that refers to it, and created WSB based on the proxy.
What I have tried so far to get the username (and why it doesn't work):

1. Had WSA implement javax.xml.rpc.server.ServiceLifecycle. This provides WSA with an instance of javax.xml.rpc.server.ServletEndpointContext, which provides me with a java.security.Principal. However, that Principal is null if I call WSB (which in turn calls WSA). If I secure WSA and call it directly, the Pricipal is not null and contains the user (but it doesn't solve the problem, because I need to call WSB, not WSA).

2. Created handlers (extending javax.xml.rpc.handler.GenericHandler) for both services, which were supposed to be able to process the message. One thing really baffled me here. The handler methods get called correctly - the WSB handler handles the request, then the WSA handler handles the request, then the WSA handler handles the response and finally the WSB handler handles the response. But when I tried printing the messages to a file on each step, I found out that even at the first step (when WSB handles the request) there is no security information in the message. No username, no nothing. The message is in fact quite different from what is shown on the invocation page when previewing the request message before invoking the service.

3. Tried injecting an instance of WebServiceContext by using the @Resource annotation, but apparently OC4J doesn't support this.

If anyone can shed some light on where I might be doing something wrong, I would be very thankful.

Answer 1

The problem is that "WSA is called by a method with no arguments in an unsecured web service". So, there is no security context for WSA to pick-up the user id from...

The simplest fix might be to change the WSA API to accept a user id in the request parameters.

HTH Tom