subtle installation issue with shiro + uppercase email

[benjamin-richter-bkg]

In https://github.com/ec-jrc/re3gistry/blob/v2.4.2/sources/Re3gistry2Base/src/main/java/eu/europa/ec/re3gistry2/base/utility/UserHelper.java#L126 (current version as of 2023-04-25) the email address is turned into lower case. However, this case transformation does not seem to happen when the admin user is created during installation (https://github.com/ec-jrc/re3gistry/blob/v2.4.2/sources/Re3gistry2JavaAPI/src/main/java/eu/europa/ec/re3gistry2/javaapi/handler/RegInstallationStep3Handler.java#L49). This leads to login failures when typing an email address with uppercase letters.

As the exception handler https://github.com/ec-jrc/re3gistry/blob/v2.4.2/sources/Re3gistry2Base/src/main/java/eu/europa/ec/re3gistry2/base/utility/UserHelper.java#L130 logs the email without the lowercase transformation, it was quite an adventure to pinpoint this issue.

I would suggest dropping the toLowerCase() call from UserHelper and using a case insensitive comparison in the RegUser.findByEmail query instead https://github.com/ec-jrc/re3gistry/blob/v2.4.2/sources/Re3gistry2Model/src/main/java/eu/europa/ec/re3gistry2/model/RegUser.java#L53

Something like LOWER(r.email) = LOWER(:email) could be a quick fix. However I'm not sure about the interactions with the persistence framework. For example, an index on LOWER(email) would be needed. As far as I understand the more correct way to do a case insensitive comparison in PostgreSQL would be using a case insensitive collation (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/collation.html) for that column, which seems even more complex with the persistence framework.

Does anyone with more experience in this codebase have an opinion?

[arantzaetxebarria]

Dear @benjamin-richter-bkg

A solution to this problem has been developed and it is fixed. It will be available in the next release v2.5.3.

Best regards

[iratigarzon]

After analyzing the issue, we found that if an admin user was created during installation and their email contained both uppercase and lowercase letters, they were unable to log in to the registry. Therefore, we made modifications to allow successful login in such cases.