[LON-CAPA-dev] Environment variables

[Christian Knieling]

Hi everybody,

I have a question for the experienced web developers.

My goal is to capture environment variables within LON-CAPA. Those
variables should be/get delivered by a Shibboleth identity provider on
successful authentication.

So, my questions are.

   Will those variables placed into the environment only in
   particular circumstances?

What I mean is, I find those variables in the case of calling a cgi
script but I don't find them when I search for them in any handler that
I tested so far such as "Apache::lontrans", "Apache::lonshibauth",
"Apache::lonshibacc", "Apache::lonacc" or "Apache::createaccount".

So, right now I believe that I won't get those variables in any handler
because it has to be a directly called cgi script.

  Am I wrong with this assumption and I just tested the wrong
  handlers?
  Or can anyone confirm this assumption and behavior?

When I'm right with this assumption:

  Would it be a suitable respectively recommended approach to
  catch those variables by a direct call of such a cgi script,
  save/populate those variables in the environment manually and
  redirect/go on with the standard LON-CAPA processing?

Or to question the other way around:

  Would have had a patch with this above approach a chance to get
  into a release?

Many questions, hopefully anyone has some answers and the time for
telling me them.

Thanks for reading so far ;)
Christian