Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Spring Security SecurityContextHolder

We have been happily using the static methods of "SecurityContextHolder" in our application. But as architects, it is important to understand what happends behind the scenes..

Where does Spring store the Principle object? My rough guess was that it would either be in Session or the ThreadLocal containers.
Found this great write-up that explains how the "Strategy" design pattern is used to store the UserDetails (Principle) object in the HTTPSession and then through a filter assigning it to the ThreadLocale container.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6408007/spring-securitys-securitycontextholder-session-or-request-bound

The advantage of this approach is that one can obtain the current 'Principle' anywhere in the code using simple static methods rather than being dependant on the request object or session object.

No comments:

Post a Comment