Hi Sam

I'm pretty new to Joomla! so please forgive me if I say something silly.

My setup is as follows:
Our company has a central MSSQL 2000 DB (the source DB)which replicates to a few postgres (8.2) DBs.
We have recently moved our website to Joomla!, and now require a certain section of the website to only be accessible to a subset of our users (those users who have purchased a minimum of 3 months' subscription to one of our products).
Joomla! has its own MySQL DB that it uses for its content management.

Our current plan of action to allow access to a section of the website to only our 3 months subscribers is to effectively duplicate the user data in MSSQL to Joomla!'s MySQL DB, in a table who's structure accommodates the built-in Joomla! authentication requirements.
The problem with this is that it is an architectural disaster that will inevitably lead to a maintenance nightmare.

My questions are:
1. Is it possible to use JAuthTools to query a java servlet for authentication? Basically, the servlet will query the user data in postgres/MSSQL and return a "true" or "false", upon which the user is either granted or denied access, respectively.
2. On this page I found mention of supporting postgres for authentication, but there is no link to a guide as to how to do it. Is it possible for JAuthTools to query across postgres tables for user authentication? The reason I ask is because the userid/username/password is stored in different table to the userid/productid, the latter being used to determine if the user has a (>=) 3 months product.

Okay, that's it. Apologies for rambling on, and I know I might not have been clear at some places, so please just ask and I'll do my best to clarify.

Kind regards,
Daevor

Hi Daevor,

A quick reply
1) You could do that, I'd suggest writing an auth plugin (standard Joomla, no jauthtools required) to handle integration into what ever directory service and authentication. You need to return stuff like a username, email address and full name back to Joomla in the jauthenticate_response but that would work if you can code PHP to connect to whatever database you need
2) this is an apache thing however you can set up what i suggest in step 1.

apologies for not replying earlier, i'm heavily snowed which doesn't help with things. basically what you need to do you can do, specifics makes things interesting though.

cheers,

sam