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Implementing SSO (Single Sign-On)

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Don't be intimidated by the seemingly daunting task of creating and easy way for your student, tutor, and admins to login to Accudemia via your school's portal.  It is far easier than it may seem.  As a support person here at Engineerica I noticed this feature is something that schools want to offer their users but are afraid to get started or maybe do not know where to do so.  Here we will go through the process of implementing SSO (Single Sign-On) easily for your institution.
Several Pre-Requisites
  1. You will need access to place hyperlinks into your webpages and create webpages/add files to your school's portal.  Usually this can be done via the Web Development Specialists at your school who can modify the files directly on your web server.  Others will need their privileges to be elevated on the school's portal or website so they can create/modify webpages on your school's website via a web-based WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editor.
  2. You will need to obtain your Accudemia Developer Key.  This can be done simply by a College-Level Admin account in Accudemia under the Administration section and clicking Advanced > Developers.  You will need this later once we want to create the Accudemia redirect webpage.
Let's get Started!
Now that we have the pre-requisites taken care of we can begin with actually implementing SSO.  If you don't understand how this process works, as far as from a security standpoint, you can read this article on the Accudemia Developer Documentation.  Basically your Portal already has authenticated the users and we have it pass us a secret key (token) with the user's ID to automatically login the user to Accudemia.  Now follow these steps using ASP.NET:
  1. On the root of your site, create a page called RedirectAccudemia.aspx, and put the following code:
  2. You need to configure the code above in the webpage to use your developer keys, where it says:
    The domain is the address you usually use to access Accudemia.
    The devkey is the developer key you get from Accudemia, as described in the section Before Start: Get your Developer Keys!.
    The userId is a bit harder to set up, because it depends on how your application works. You probably are using the .NET Principal class or the Session to store the current logged in user. If Principals are being used, you can leave it as is; if the user information is stored in the Session, your code might look like this:

    It all depends on how your Portal works. If you are not sure about it, please ask your Web Development Specialists for more help.
  3. Next edit the webpage in the Portal source code to add a link to Accudemia. For instance, add this on your site's menu:
    Also, you can have other links to access specific pages of Accudemia. If you want your users to see a link pointing to Create New Appointment, for example, add the following:



Done!  For a complete working example visit our mock Portal Website and login with the Student User ID of 555555555 and a password of 1234.  You can download all the source code of our mock Portal Website as well.  Additionally if you want the PHP version of the code visit here.
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