Infrastructure

Solr Requests are filtered with SolrDispatchFilter. The SolrDispatchFilter will take a HttpServletRequest and wrap the parameters from it into a SolrQueryRequest object. The SolrQueryRequest object is then passed into a SolrRequestHandler. The SolrRequestHandler is an interface that is implemented by a variety of defined handlers in the Solr project. And, "One way to register a SolrRequestHandler with the core is thorugh the solrconfig.xml file."

The information that is passed in the HttpServletRequest for authentication and authorization (our x509 certificate) is set as an attribute. SolrRequestHandlers do not have access to the attributes of a HttpServletRequest, just the parameter map. Therefore, I plan to create a pre-SolrDispatchFilter to parse out the subject from the x509 certifcate, determine all the groups to which the subject belongs and equivalent identities, or determine if the subject is an administrative subject(only CN's will be considered administrative subjects for this implementation) and place the information in the request's parameters map. The information should then show up in the SolrQueryRequest accessible by a SolrRequestHandler. Then, we can write our own SolrRequestHandlers based on the default implementation, SearchHandler. We may plug in our implementations (one for search and the other for logging) into our respective core solrconfig.xml files. We also need to add in a filter definition in web.xml prior to the SolrDispatchFilter definition.