Can the Gateway portlet be used to SSO into WebAdvisor?

Yes. It is possible to use the Gateway SSO portlet with a special bridge file to accomplish single sign-on into Datatel's WebAdvisor.

WebAdvisor is a web application that requires some dynamic pieces of information to accomplish a sign on. As described in Using Gateway SSO for Web Applications with Dynamic Log In Forms, it is possible to use the Gateway SSO in some of these cases. In particular, we know of at least two schools that have successfully done so with WebAdvisor.

As it turns out, the generic bridge is not sufficient to accomplish the single sign on into WebAdvisor. It requires some additional WebAdvisor specific code to work around some of its special behavior.

NOTE: It may be that in a different environment that even more customizations may be necessary. Also, different versions of WebAdvisor may require additional changes (if it will work at all). The version of WebAdvisor that this bridge was seen to work with was version 3.0.4

The best place to start is by doing the following:

1. Download the gateway-webadvisor.xml which is the Gateway SSO configuration file for use with WebAdvisor. Place and use it as described in Academus 2.0 Gateway Portlet Configuration Guide. Use it where the document refers to gateway-portlet.xml.
2. Download and the place the files as indicated in Using Gateway SSO for Web Applications with Dynamic Log In Forms
3. Replace the bridgeB.html with bridgeB_WebAdvisor.html. Rename bridgeB_WebAdvisor.html to bridgeB.html.
4. Edit bridgeB.html and gateway-webadvisor.xml, replacing webadvisor.someschool.edu and someschool.edu with the sub-domain and domain, respectively, used at your institution for your WebAdvisor instance. Double check all of the places where referenced to make sure the URL being constructed, or used, is appropriate.

If you need to escape a string to appear in a URL, you can click here and copy the text you would like to escape and click OK. Then copy the resulting text where you need it. Conversely, if you want to unescape an existing URL, you can click here.

Hopefully between the Academus 2.0 Gateway Portlet Configuration Guide and the bridge KBA you will be able to resolve any remaining issues in getting it to work as desired.

If you find other solutions around SSO into WebAdvisor, please comment on this KBA and share that experience with others.