… and points beyond

My apologies for the code that was posted here. Copying and pasting broke the code. Download a ZIP of the code here.

I have expanded on the demo code that was floating around at Qonnections 2008. That code included an ASP page that made the requests using system objects and will not work outside IIS.

What about getting rid of IIS entirely? There are some changes we need to make. We want a ticket for a user other than the one making the request (GetTicketForMe). To do that QVHTTP requires POST instead of GET. The username, contained in XML, is passed as the body of the POST request. The requester must be authenticated as a member of the QlikView Administrators group.

To play with the test page:

• Be sure that the IIS website is stopped and QlikView HTTP Service is started.
• Copy the code below into an HTML file and save it in the QVHTTP base directory. For QV 8.2, this is C:\Program Files\QlikView\Examples\QvsHtmlWebpages\.
• Switch the QV Server to use DMS instead of NTFS authentication. Edit the metadata and add a username to a QV application.
• Load the demo page in IE or Firefox. For example, http://QVServer/qlikview/FileName.html.
• Fill in the name of the app you want to load and the user ID for the ticket request.
• Press the buttons to load the app using a requested ticket.
• The requester must be authenticated as a member of the QlikView Administrators group.
• A ticket will be issued and either displayed or used to request the app.

Each time you press a button, a ticket request is made. The QV Server issues a new ticket even if you request the same user ID again. User IDs are not case sensitive.

Unfortunately, this is not a complete implementation. Behind the scenes, the QV HTTP Server and your browser negotiated an NTLM authentication. This may have been transparent depending in your Windows network, but otherwise you were asked to provide the user & pass of a member of the QlikView Administrators group.

The point is that NTLM authentication is something supported by your browser and that the software issuing the POST request needs to handle NTLM authentication. There are resources that describe NTLM authentication in detail if you want to implement your own. There are tools (such as WGET) that support POST requests and NTLM authentication and can be scripted, though I have yet to try it. Indications from QlikTech are that they will add a more flexible option to authenticate the requester in upcoming versions.

I’ll be trying to do a scripted ticket request using a utility like WGET in the future. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Again, my thanks to Henric Cronstrom, Dan English, Ingemar Carlo, Johan Jeansson and Claus at QlikTech.

My apologies for the code that was posted here. Copying and pasting broke the code. Download a ZIP of the code here.