Gotchas

OpenMRS configuration

• OpenMRS implements a whitelist policy for route names. Standard JSP pages must use a pre-defined extension. See the web.xml for the entire list (see the servlet-mapping tags).
• The Spring configuration files are: (as defined in web.xml)
  • applicationContext-service.xml
  • openmrs-servlet.xml
  • Each module's:
    • moduleApplicationContext.xml
    • webModuleApplicationContext.xml

Implementing Basic Authentication with RestTemplate & Spring

It took a couple of goes to get Spring to actually send an "Authorization" header out with RestTemplate requests. Part of the problem is that to do something as trivial as send a http request with basic authentication you need to wire up all these intermediary objects just to get it configured.

• My first attempt was pass in credentials via a BasicCredentialsProvider to the HttpClient - that didn't work
• My 2nd attempt was a convoluted solution described here which also didn't work.
• At this stage I saw that someone else had a similar issue which was apparently fixed by forcing the "Accept" header to "/" so I tried that but again didn't work
• My 3rd attempt was just to go back to basics and manually create the Authorization header - and yay! it worked!