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Description of Flow – through sfx and EZProxy, to a Shibboleth protected resource

  1. User is working from off-campus.
  1. User accesses MedLine, does a search, finds relevant Abstracts.
  1. User clicks OPENURL button, gets redirected to SFX server at their home campus.
  1. SFX server provides user with a menu of choices for accessing the resource; user selects "view online" option. SFX server prepends EZproxy prefix, and redirects user to local EZProxy server, passing eventual target url and parameters to access a single article within that target ("the deep link") (note: this description was taken from the chicago page on the wiki – info from Tod – SFX is designed to pass article-specific information to the journal aggregator's service, but it's up to the journal aggregator to resolve the reference and complete the deep linking. When SFX first came out, many vendors didn't actually link down to the article level, but would leave the user at the issue, journal, or even top-level database. That was some years ago, deep linking straight to the article is now much more the norm.)
  1. CURRENTLY, For shibboleth-protected resources not appearing in EZproxy's configuration, EZproxy redirects the user browser directly to the resource, and the shibboleth transaction proceeds without further involvement of EZproxy.
  1. (Suggestion from Scott Cantor) EZProxy should redirect the user to a SessionInitiator at the SP along with a parameter telling it which IdP to use, and a parameter containing the deep link url. This will bypass all WAYF processing, and return the browser user to their IdP for authn, and then return them to the deep link.

(From Chris Zagar: A release of EZproxy coming this summer adds the ability to dynamically alter "starting point URLs", which are URLs that look like:

http://ezproxy.yourlib.org/login?url=http://www.somedb.com/

allowing regular expression changes to be applied. That facility will include the ability to alter a URL which could easily include rerouting it into the local IdP. This brings in the possibility of changing the URLs to add in any hints that might be needed on the receiving vendor side for the URL, but that might not be reflected in SFX.

Any change you could suggest some before-after versions of edge case URLs for consideration so I can insure that they would be covered?)

  1. If the resource does appear in EZproxy's configuration, then EZProxy redirects the browser to the "proxy" component of EZProxy.
  1. The proxy component of EZProxy accesses the real target url, and retrieves the desired online article.
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