Clarity

We are having the same problem reported here. 

I think the link in the "correct answer" response is broken - it links back to the same thread and I can't find that thread by searching the support site.

Can an updated link be provided ?

Many link/URLs got broken when the community moved over to Jive a while ago, if you search on the thread title you can often find the right link though;

Correct link is now ; Clarity 13 URLs - Use of Hash/Fragments ( https://communities.ca.com/message/101243226 ) but I don't think that is going to help much, its quite an old post.

Thanks for your response.   We are new to Clarity On Demand and accessing it via SAML federated single sign on.

We have been advised by CA Support that Clarity On Demand does not support Service Provider Initiated Single Sign On.

This was a surprise to us because the On Demand Portal Admin Guide states one of the parameters available is "Identity Provider SSO Service URL: The Identity Provider's Web Service used in case of time-outs, log-outs, and Service Provider Initiated SSO".

We also suspect the On Demand Portal is built with CA SiteMinder which does support Service Provider Initiated SSO.

Being limited to Identity Provider SSO means we need to construct links to Clarity in the form https://<identity provider url>?PartnerSpid=<service provider id>TargetResource=<Clarity URL>

Clarity URL's contain "#" and the single sign on interaction between the identity provider, the On Demand Portal and Clarity application results in everything after the # being stripped from the URL.

This means every link to Clarity takes you to the Home page.

We can achieve deep linking by replacing the # with %23 in URL's we generate or publish ourselves.  But we cannot do that for URL's generated by Clarity, such as those included in email notifications.

When a user receives an email from Clarity containing a link to a project, dashboard or action, clicking the link always takes them to the home page - unless they have their browser open and have previously accessed Clarity to create a session.

This is clunky and will impact user adoption.

I can't believe we are the only customers to have this issue.  Has anyone solved this with a work around ? Or got Service Provider Initiated SSO working with Clarity On Demand ?

There is a configuration parameter in the Clarity properties.xml file (not directly available to you in the SaaS / OnDemand model but can be configured and set on your behalf) that allows for the configuration of how URLs are presented externally (the attribute is called "external_url").

This parameter allows for your SSO provider URL and parameters, and it will also support some simple 'replace' functionality where the # symbols can be encoded and/or changed to server-side ? character query strings.

This would then apply to most (if not all) URLs present in email notifications and links in data exported to excel.

I take it you have had an issue number open where this has been being discussed, so I'm not (yet) privy to any reasons why this might not have been a viable option to you - could you please advise me of the issue number so I can examine the history?

The support issue number is #00191121.

Regards

Thanks - Steve and I are monitoring the issue now, and at the moment it looks like you're heading in the right direction.

Does https://communities.ca.com/message/99738099#99738099 help?

In particular what is the value of the externalUrl parameter in the application server section of properties.xml

Thanks for the link - it looks like the solution we need.  We will discuss with the On Demand support team.