Attribute Definitions

The definition of an attribute in CAS, when fetched and resolved from an authentication or attribute repository source, tends to be defined and referenced using its name without any additional metadata or decorations. For example, you may wish to retrieve a uid attribute and virtually rename and map it to a userIdentifier attribute either globally or for specific application integrations. For most use cases, this configuration works quite comfortably and yet, depending on the nature of the target application and the authentication protocol used to complete the integration, additional requirements could be imposed and may have to be specified to define an attribute with additional pointers, when shared and released with a relying party. For example, a SAML2 service provider may require a scoped attribute for an eduPersonPrincipalName whose value is always determined from the uid attribute with a special friendly-name that is always provided regardless of the target application.

While bits and pieces of metadata about a given attribute can be defined either globally in CAS configuration settings or defined inside a service definition, an attribute definition store allows one to describe metadata about necessary attributes with special decorations to be considered during attribute resolution and release. The specification of the attribute definition store is entirely optional and the store may not contain any attribute definitions.

The following settings and properties are available from the CAS configuration catalog:

The configuration settings listed below are tagged as Required in the CAS configuration metadata. This flag indicates that the presence of the setting may be needed to activate or affect the behavior of the CAS feature and generally should be reviewed, possibly owned and adjusted. If the setting is assigned a default value, you do not need to strictly put the setting in your copy of the configuration, but should review it nonetheless to make sure it matches your deployment expectations.

  • cas.authn.attribute-repository.attribute-definition-store.json.location=

    • The location of the resource. Resources can be URLS, or files found either on the classpath or outside somewhere in the file system.

    In the event the configured resource is a Groovy script, specially if the script set to reload on changes, you may need to adjust the total number of inotify instances. On Linux, you may need to add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf: fs.inotify.max_user_instances = 256.

    You can check the current value via cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances.

    org.apereo.cas.configuration.model.SpringResourceProperties.
    The configuration settings listed below are tagged as Optional in the CAS configuration metadata. This flag indicates that the presence of the setting is not immediately necessary in the end-user CAS configuration, because a default value is assigned or the activation of the feature is not conditionally controlled by the setting value. You should only include this field in your configuration if you need to modify the default value.