Auto Login Enabled For Good

[oliver]

In February, I published the post Tales of Mystery and Authentication in which we announced the highly anticipated auto login feature, immediately followed by A Necessary Update On Auto Login just to announce it was disabled again. A couple of issues with the platform dealing with the rising amount of permission checks to be managed and the resulting performance impact made it necessary for us to go back to our office cubes and fix them.

To remind you, the promise of auto login is to get you logged in to SCN automatically at visit without having to click on the login link in the header. In order to achieve this it is relying on an existing authentication session either via checking Remember Me in the login screen or having a browser certificate in place. Tales of Mystery and Authentication has more details on the exact working of this feature.

You may notice that it is close to four months now since A Necessary Update On Auto Login was posted and expectations where to have this fixed much sooner. We used the time to analyse the implementation with the SAP ID Service team and build a more robust, scalable version of auto login. We also improved our load testing framework to simulate the much higher number of authentication requests by removing the dependency to the number of test accounts. In between there was also the SCN Gamification release, which we have been working on in parallel for the whole time, not to mention the SAP ID Service team releasing Social Login via Twitter and Facebook.

That said, since last Monday, auto login has been enabled and we haven't seen any significant issues since then, which is why I'm confident that auto login will stay with us.

The basic architecture hasn't changed. We still rely on a cookie called IDS_PassiveLogonDone, as described in Tales of Mystery and Authentication. Cookie handling can be hard with the client side browser and all its modern extensibility options in place. In case you see auto login not working as expected on your side, please head over the the SCN Support space and let us know. Feel free to leave a comment here and let us know how it is working for you.

Oliver