NAME

News::Web::CookieAuth - authentication for News::Web via cookies

SYNOPSIS

use News::Web::CookieAuth;
use CGI;

my $cookie = CGI->cookie('nntpauthinfo') || "";
my $authinfo = News::Web::CookieAuth->new($cookie);

See 'setcookie.cgi' for a fairly comprehensive tutorial.

DESCRIPTION

This documentation is far from complete. However, the module itself is just meant to be glue; if you're using it, you can probably spend some time and work out how it works.

The cookie itself contains these fields:

  nntpuser	The NNTP user to connect to the server as 
  nntppass	The NNTP password, in clear text (these things are 
		generally passed in cleartext anyway, and so shouldn't
		be considered secure in the first place
  realname	The user's real name (half of the From: heaer)
  emailadd	The user's email address (half of the From: heaer)
  signature 	The user's signature file
  version	Not currently used, but useful if we decide to use
		different versions of the cookie.

USAGE

Functions

new ( [COOKIE] )

Creates the News::Web::CookieAuth object, based on the string COOKIE. If not passed, then you can later add it with read_cookie().

version ( [DATA] )

nntpuser ( [DATA] )

nntppass ( [DATA] )

realname ( [DATA] )

emailadd ( [DATA] )

signature ( [DATA] )

Reads or manipulates the given field. If DATA is passed, sets the field as appropriate; either way, it returns the value of the field.

cookie ()

Returns or manipulates the cookie itself, as above. Not as good an idea to do this, since without read_cookie() the other values are not manipulated.

set ()

value ( FIELD )

Reads the specific FIELD.

make_cookie ()

read_cookie ( [COOKIE] )

Reads the information from COOKIE (defaults to the value of cookie()) into the object.

fields ()

Returns a hash of the fields stored in the object.

Returns either either a hashref (when invoked in scalar context) or the hash itself.

html ()

REQUIREMENTS

CGI.pm

SEE ALSO

CGI.pm, News::Web

NOTES

This is hardly the ideal form of authentication; however, it's a lot simpler to implement generally than a database-backed solution would be. This doesn't change the fact that I'd rather use the database-backed solution in the future, though, which is why this module is fairly general and could be re-implemented as some other class...

AUTHOR

Tim Skirvin <tskirvin@killfile.org>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2003 by Tim Skirvin <tskirvin@killfile.org>. This code may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.