Details
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Improvement
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Status: Closed
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Major
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Resolution: Won't Fix
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1.0-M2
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None
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None
Description
It would be nice if the default security realms all used the same user and group principal implementation classes. For one thing, the code is 99% identical across all 4 existing implementation classes. But also, these are essentially generic, and it would be nice to provide generic implementations of users and groups that custom login modules could take advantage of, instead of setting the precedent that every module must have a new and different set of principal classes.
If we truly make the user and group principals generic, we would lose the current behavior that equals() can distinguish between a SQLUserPrincipal "foo" and a PropertiesFileUserPrincipal "foo", but I'm not sure that's all that important anyway – the required class name goes into the configuration files, so if the class name isn't correct then the principal needs to be discarded regardless of what equals() reports. Plus, a principal "foo" from FileRealm "bar" is not actually the same as a principal "foo" from FileRealm "baz" even though the user principal implementation classes and user principal names are both the same – so the current equals implementation isn't fully correct anyway.
However, if we still want different classes for different realm types for any reason, we could at least put all the code in a base class and then have empty subclasses.