(Legacy) iOS Authentication Error - adobepass.ios.app Cannot Be Found ios-authentication-error-adobepass.ios.app-cannot-be-found

Issue issue

The user is going through the Authentication flow, and after they successfully entered their credentials with their provider they get redirected back to either an error page, a search page, or some other custom page informing them that adobepass.ios.app could not be found/resolved.

Explanation explanation

On iOS, adobepass.ios.app is used as the final redirection URL to indicate that the AuthN flow is complete. At this point the app needs to make a request to the AccessEnabler to get the AuthN Token and to finalize the AuthN flow.

The problem is that adobepass.ios.app doesn’t actually exist and will trigger an error message in the webView. Older versions of the iOS DemoApp assumed that this error would always be triggered at the end of the AuthN flow, and was set up to handle it accordingly (indidFailLoadWithError).

Note: This issue has been fixed in later versions of the DemoApp (included with the iOS SDK download).

Unfortunately, this assumption is NOT correct. There are some so-called “smart” DNS or Proxy servers that won’t simply pass-on the raised error, but will instead do one of the following:

In those cases, the response that comes back to the iOS webView will be a perfectly valid response as far as the webView is concerned, and will NOT trigger the error that the old DemoApp was depending on.

Solution solution

Do NOT make the same assumption that the DemoApp makes. Instead, intercept the request before it is executed (in shouldStartLoadWithRequest) and handle it appropriately.

Example of how to intercept the request before it is executed:

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView*)localWebView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest*)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType {

NSString *absolutePath = [[request URL] absoluteString];
if ([absolutePath isEqualToString:ADOBEPASS_REDIRECT_URL] && ![APP_DELEGATE getAuthenticationWasCalled]) {

// user was logged ok => call getAuthenticationToken()
[APP_DELEGATE setGetAuthenticationWasCalled:YES];
[[APP_DELEGATE accessEnabler] getAuthenticationToken];
return NO;

}

return YES;

}

A few things to note: