Thank you very much for all this information. This is much appreciated.

If we were to rename username to something else, I think principal makes the more sense, as this is what is used by Spring.

Fabien

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Fabien Potencier
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On 11/2/10 3:12 PM, Jeremy Mikola wrote:
Sorry if I'm late to the discussion, but better late than never.

I support something generic such as UserIdentifier or Principal.  With a
number of Symfony1 projects under my belt, and now some Symfony2, I've
seen plenty of cases where a username was not the only or even preferred
method of logging in (vs. email, OpenID, OAuth, etc.), but the common
denominator was always the user's ID.

After working a bit with Jasig's CAS project (single sign-on system in
Java/Spring) and implementing a Symfony2 bundle for it, I came to
appreciate their notion of a principal.  When you login to the CAS
server, you typically provide a username and password combination.  CAS
doesn't assume that the username field is your principal -- it leaves
that up to you to configure.  At OpenSky, we needed to support
username/email in the "username" field to be flexible, so our principal
ended up being the user's GUID.

The first step of CAS's login process is to utilize a PrincipalResolver
service that takes some input (arbitrary username/email in our case) and
converts it into a principal (GUID for the user account in our case).
After this step, the password input and principal are then verified
using a separate service in CAS.  As you might expect, this requires at
least two DB queries; however, it offers a great deal of extensibility
thanks to DI.

If you consider an authentication system using nothing but Facebook
Connect or some other third-party service, we might not even have a
username or password available for an account, but we'd have a principal
identifier for the user account in our database.  I suppose that is
exactly what would be stored in the session (thinking back to sfGuard).

If I were integrating Facebook Connect into CAS, I'd simply create a
PrincipalResolver service to take its input from FB's API and lookup the
user ID in our database corresponding to the FB user's ID, if any.  The
password service would be a no-op.

I apologize if this went off-topic, but I think this presents a
legitimate reason for keeping things generic.  And while I'd personally
use the user ID as the principal, I think the developer using Symfony2
should certainly be able to configure the "principal" field (anything
with a unique constraint would technically be eligible).

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 8:17 AM, Bulat Shakirzyanov
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

    My vote is for "principal"

    Sent from my Nexus One



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