Authentication and fragments¶

Authentication¶

Right now, we know that any user opening a Constellation project is authenticated.

However, Constellation Projects are composed of Fragments, each of which has to be accessed by Modelio to compose the project effective contents. Furthermore, each fragment composing a Project may have its own technology (SVN, http…) and consequently may have its own authentication scheme and data. How does Modelio access such fragments ?

Modelio deals with this additional complexity by supporting two different Fragment Authentication Strategy (FAS) when accessing a fragment:

• Project Authentication Mode (PAM): In this mode, the project authentication data is used to access the fragment.
• Fragment Authentication Mode (FAM): In this mode, specific authentication technique and data can be specified for the fragment

Obviouly, the PAM mode is the simpler mode to use and configure and it shall be preferred where possible. This is the natural mode for Constellation and it is proposed by default when creating new projects and fragments in the Constellation administration pages.

However, in some circumstances, fragments referenced by a project and thereby composing it, may come from outside (eg: external organisation, partner company and so on.) and be out of reach of any configuration:

• already existing fragments where users already have accounts and where these existing accounts do not match Constellation accounts and cannot be easily changed
• external fragments, managed by an external authority, for which a unique account has been granted for everyone (eg: anonymous or generic account)
• public fragments that require no authentication data at all

In such situations, the Constellation project administrator will exploit the FAM mode to define specific access strategy and data for each of these fragments. Note that specific FAS and FAM can be defined for each Profile of the Project, providing even more more flexibility.

In the FAM mode, the authentication data provided by the user can be locally stored by Modelio to avoid the burden of re-entering user and pass each time the project is opened.