Authenticating requests 

Many operations, such as entry updates, require authentication by default. In addition, if the IBM Connections administrator configures the servers to force authentication, all operations will first require you to authenticate.


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API resources that are public do not require authentication. Authentication is required before users can access the Activities, Home page, and Search applications by default. The rest of the applications do not initially force authentication. This configuration allows applications like Profiles and Blogs to be open to everyone for browsing, and only require authentication when a user tries to edit a personal profile or blog. If you want Lotus Connection to require authentication for all of the applications, the administrator must explicitly configure it.

For API resources that do not require authentication, traffic is sent over HTTP. API programs that access resources that require authentication must use the HTTP basic authentication method to provide a user name and password.  The API client program can either preemptively send basic authentication credentials or only send them in response to a "HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized" challenge from the IBM Connections server.  To prevent credentials from being sent in the clear, the API (except for the Files and Wikis API) always sends a redirect to HTTPS before issuing the unauthorized challenge. The Files and Wikis APIs use J2EE declarative security, which does not support the redirection of basic authentication requests to HTTPS before requesting authentication credentials.  Regardless, the client program should ensure it only sends credentials over an SSL secured connection. 

To force API traffic to be sent over HTTPS, you can configure IBM Connections to force all traffic to be sent using SSL. See Forcing traffic to be sent over SSL for more details.


Parent topic

Getting started


Related tasks


Forcing users to log in before they can access an application
Forcing traffic to be sent over SSL

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