Form-based authentication in native Windows 8 applications

Overview

This tutorial illustrates the native Windows 8 Universal client-side authentication components for form-based authentication.
Prerequisite: Make sure that you read Form-based authentication first.

This tutorial covers the following topics:

• Creating the client-side authentication components
• Sample application

Creating the client-side authentication components

Create a native Windows 8 Universal application and add the MobileFirst native APIs as explained in the documentation.

FormChallengeHandler

Create a FormChallengeHandler class as a subclass of ChallengeHandler.
Your FormChallengeHandler class must implement the isCustomResponse and handleChallenge methods.

The isCustomResponse method checks every custom response received from MobileFirst Server to verify whether this is the expected challenge.

public override bool isCustomResponse(WLResponse response)
{
    if (response == null || response.getResponseText() == null || !response.getResponseText().Contains("j_security_check"))
    {
        return false;
    }
    else
    {
        return true;
    }
}

The handleChallenge method is called after the isCustomResponse method returns true.
Within this method, present your login form. Different approaches are available.

public override void handleChallenge(JObject response)
{
  CoreApplication.MainView.CoreWindow.Dispatcher.RunAsync(CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal,
async () =>
  {
     MainPage._this.LoginGrid.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;
  });
}

From the login form , credentials are passed to the FormChallengeHandler class. Use the submitLoginForm() method to send input data to the authenticator.

public void sendResponse(String username, String password)
{
   Dictionary<String, String> parms = new Dictionary<String, String>();
   parms.Add("j_username", username);
   parms.Add("j_password", password);
   submitLoginForm("j_security_check", parms, null, 0, "post");
}

MainPage

Within the MainPage class, connect to MobileFirst Server, register your challengeHandler and invoke the protected adapter procedure.
The procedure invocation triggers MobileFirst Server to send a challenge that will trigger our challenge handler.

WLClient wlClient = WLClient.getInstance();
FormChallengeHandler ch = new FormChallengeHandler();
wlClient.registerChallengeHandler((BaseChallengeHandler<JObject>)ch);
MyResponseListener mylistener = new MyResponseListener(this);
wlClient.connect(mylistener);

Because the native API not protected by a defined security test, no login form is presented during server connection.
Invoke the protected adapter procedure. The login form is presented by the challengeHandler.

 WLResourceRequest adapter = new WLResourceRequest("/adapters/AuthAdapter/getSecretData", "GET");
 MyInvokeListener listener = new MyInvokeListener(this);
 adapter.send(listener);

Sample application

Click to download the MobileFirst project.

Click to download the Native project.

• The FormBasedAuth project contains a MobileFirst native API that you can deploy to your MobileFirst server.
• The FormBasedAuthWin8 project contains a native Windows 8 Universal application that uses a MobileFirst native API library.
• Make sure to update the wlclient.properties file in the native project with the relevant server settings.