11 June 2009, 10:34

I have followed the Mahoodle instructions for getting SSO from Moodle to Mahara, but have a problem.  We are using LDAP authentication with automatic account creation on both Moodle and Mahara.  If a new user logs into Mahara, their account gets created correctly, with data pulled from LDAP. If they later log in to Moodle and SSO over to Mahara, a second Mahara account is created, their username having a "1" appended.  Things are OK if the user's first login is via Moodle, and they later log in directly - just one account is used.  Any ideas?

11 June 2009, 21:17

Hi. I think you have fallen victim to this bug. I have bumped up the priority on it, as it seems people are doing this more widely.

The solution in the meantime is to ensure people come in through the Moodle first, which you might be able to arrange with appropriate social engineering.

27 July 2009, 12:36

Hi

We are experiencing the same thing. We have been using Mahara for over a year now. Until recently we have had some software program limitations that have prevented us from doing the Mahoodle integration. We were forced to do independent logins and load our users into both Moodle and Mahara separately. These limitations have been lifted and we'd like to do the integration.

However, we have 2-3 years of users already entered in our Mahara set up with a significant amount of uploads and views. I have tried to run the SSO once already only to have the double entry bug pop up and cut that plan short. Moving forward on a fix would be very useful.

Thanks

27 July 2009, 18:35

Hi - the solution to this bug won't directly help you, as you have existing accounts set up to authenticate via LDAP in the Mahara. Even if this bug was fixed, users coming from Moodle would still get new accounts. I think what you need to do is to set up SSO like before, but set your LDAP authinstance as the "parent" authinstance for it (there's a dropdown for it on the XMLRPC config).

If you did that, it would tell Mahara that users coming from the Moodle are the same as those users using LDAP. It might be the solution you're looking for, though I'd definitely try it out in a staging environment first.

If that worked, then you'd be affected by this bug - if users logged into the Mahara first, then logged into Mahara through Moodle, they'd get a separate account. But, you could fix that by turning on the $cfg->usersuniquebyusername setting as both sides for you are using LDAP. That's probably more information than you need right now though!

29 July 2009, 15:24

OK, I think I have it figured out. Let me know if this sounds about right.

This is the behavior I have observed for existing Mahara accounts and Moodle network:

1) user auth method: internal   SSO from Moodle => new account

2) user auth method: XMLRPC no parent   SSO from Moodle only, no Mahara sign in

3)  user auth method: XMLRPC internal parent   SSO from Moodle, Mahara sign in

 The last is the behavior I am looking for.

Out of curiosity, will it be importing profile information from the Moodle site for existing users?

Thanks

29 July 2009, 19:12

What you probably want is XMLRPC with LDAP parent. That will allow your users to sign in at the Mahara with LDAP details.

Data is imported from Moodle to Mahara in two circumstances:

1. When user accounts are created for the first time that you sign in from Moodle to Mahara (this happens when you check the box 'we auto create users', I think you already have this on).
2. If you have also checked 'update user info on login', it will happen every time a user SSOs from Moodle to Mahara. Most of the time, actually we advocate turning that setting off, as users often want to change how they're represented in a Mahara, and also we don't lock their profile fields so they can get confused if their details keep getting overwritten.