how to configure basic authentication for portal access?

In a customer project we had to change the default FORM-based logon of the portal to BASIC Authentication. Since we’ve done already a lot of tricky stuff with the java stack authentication stack, my first thought was, that his shouldn’t be too hard. But then this became another story.

After quite some time and  a lot of reading and trying, we’ve had to learn that there is more than just the java authenication stack when it comes to portal applications. Since in a single portal page there can be several iviews with different authentication needs the portal framework uses so called “authentication schemes”.

An authentication scheme is a definition of what is required for an authentication process. This includes:

– The login module stack that is used to determine whether a user is granted access to an application

– The user interfaces that are used to gather the information required to authenticate a user

– Priority, allowing authentication schemas to be ordered

For  more information about authentication schemes see the sap documentation:

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw74/helpdata/en/53/a87642ac86d142e10000000a1550b0/frameset.htm

The rest of the story can be read in my forum post:

how to configure basic authentication for portal access?

After all once more it became evident that also easy looking things my turn into serious problems. However, only real problems lead to real solutions…

cheers,

Patrick