Authentication, Private Site and iPad/iPhone

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Authentication, Private Site and iPad/iPhone

We have had our Public and Private iTunesU sites up for years. Authentication for our private site works great for computers, but fails for the iPad and iPhone. Clicking on our private site link redirects to iTunes on the devices but then you get an error "You do not have access to this page" in iTunes. In the normal authentication flow, this is where you should be redirected back to our authentication site. This never happens. SO...

Should the private iTunesU site be accessable from mobile devices?
Is there something we need to change on our authentication side?

Thanks for any help!

-Chris

iPad 2, iOS 5.0.1

Posted on Feb 10, 2012 12:23 PM

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Answer 1

CGreenough Author

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Feb 10, 2012 1:22 PM in response to CGreenough

Just found out what the problem was. It seems iTunes on iOS does not redirect you if you show up to a private site without credentials, like it does for iTunes on Windows/OSX. I changed our links to go to our internal authentication page FIRST and then the user shows up at iTunes already authenticated. This solved the problem. Not sure what the ramifications of not doing the initial redirect, but this seems to work for all the testing I just preformed.

Let me know if there are any questions.

Thanks!

-Chris

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Answer 2

mmatiz

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May 11, 2012 5:31 AM in response to CGreenough

Chris,

Just saw your note and we have figured out the same thing: iOS does not redirect you to a private site without credentials. Works fine if you have credentials.

Can you describe how you changed the "BrowsePrivately" links to force them to hit the authentication page first? We have a similar situation and we are hoping for a simple fix to this iOS issue for private site links.

Thanks for any help.

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Answer 3

CGreenough Author

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May 11, 2012 9:50 AM in response to mmatiz

Originally I had the links pointing to the private iTunesU site directly, iTunes would then redirected back to our internal authentication. I changed these links to go to our internal app that handles authentication. It then sends the user back to iTunes See the following URL for the page and the links that work.

http://itunes.nau.edu/

Note the Public site URL. This is what the Private site looked like before I changed it to our internal auth site.

Hope that helps!

-Chris

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