## 1.8. Shibboleth

OLAT comes with a Shibboleth 1.3 compliant authentication provider (see chapter on Authentication). This means, OLAt integrates with your existing Shibboleth infrastructure for authentication and you may use the attributes released by your Shibboleth Identity Provider to restrict access to courses.

### 1.8.1. Registration

When a user first successfully authenticates herself via Shibboleth, she must register with OLAT. The user is asked for a username which identifies the user within OLAT. A user profile is generated and the email address provided by the Identity Provider's Attribute Authority is automatically added to the profile. This implies that an Identity Provider's Attribute Authority must at least provide an email address attribute. Furthermore, a unique identifier is needed which is configurable per site in the olat_config.xml. After accepting the disclaimer, the user is forwarded to the home screen and registration is completed.

### 1.8.2. Attributes

Shibboleth may provide attribtues of a user to OLAT. These attributes are propagated within OLAT upon each successfull authentication. The attributes can be used within course building blocks to define access and visibility rules. Note that these attributes are not persisted, except for the unique identifier (used to associate an authenticated user to its OLAT user profile) and the email address.

For easier handling of attributes, you may define a set of attribute translations in olat_config.xml. For example, a standard attribute defined by Shibboleth is `urn:mace:dir:attribute-def:givenName` which is both hard to remember and enter into form fields. With the attribute translation map, you can translate this attribute's name to `givenName` and reference it in your accessability and visibility rules with its translated name.

### 1.8.3. Home Organisation Preselection

To provide less clicks for the users in a shibbolized login environement we built in several convenience methods for easier login.

- If the user does already have an valid session he gets automatically redirected to OLAT again.

- After the user first selected his home organisation a cookie gets stored which keeps the selected value for future visits and preselects the home organisation.

- For course authors who like to point to OLAT and preselect a home organisation they can use the following syntax to do this.

  https://your.server.com/olat/dmz/aai?preselection=unizh.ch&redirect=true

  The parameter preselection preselects the home organisation. The optional parameter redirect can be enabled to skip the OLAT home organisation selection screen and redirect immedialty to the home organisation mentioned in parameter preselection.