Federation Guides › Partnership Federation Guide › Open Format Cookie Details

Open Format Cookie Details

This section contains the following topics:

Contents of the Open Format Cookie

Contents of the Open Format Cookie

The federation open format cookie lets applications assert user attributes to CA SiteMinder® and consume user attributes that CA SiteMinder® encapsulates. The open format cookie has the following general characteristics:

• The cookie is accessible by applications written in any programming language.
• The cookie content consists of a string of UTF-8 bytes, which supports international character sets.
• The combined size in UTF-8 bytes of each name/value pair precedes the name/value pair.
• Space characters are added for legibility.
• The cookie is simple to parse and easily extensible.

Important! If the cookie contains any unsafe characters such as '=', enclose the value in double quotes. You can specify this option through the user interface, or through the SDK.

The open format cookie contains the following property information:

• Cookie Version
• Name ID
• Name ID Format
• Session ID
• AuthnContext
• UserDN (same as User ID)

The following diagram shows the open format:

Key:

• Ver — the cookie format version; for CA SiteMinder® Federation r12.1, this value is 1.
• Sp — an ASCII space character, used only to improve readability.
• Properties — information about the principal.
• Attributes — SAML attributes from the Assertion
• Cnt — the number of name value pairs that follow, represented in ASCII.
• Sz — the length of the name or value that follows
• ValCnt — the number of attribute values that follow. For CA SiteMinder® Federation r12.1, multiple values for an attribute are not supported. Set this value to 1.

The Backus-Naur Form (BNF) for this format is following (0* means 0 or more; 1* means at least 1).

• DIGIT = ASCII digit (0 through 9)
• CHAR = UTF-8 character
• Sp = ASCII space (character 32)
• Token = 1*CHAR
• Cookie = Version Sp Properties Attributes
• Version = 1*DIGIT
• Cnt = 1*DIGIT
• Properties = Cnt 1*PPair
• Attributes = Cnt 0*APair
• ValCnt = 1*DIGIT
• PPair = Sz Sp Name Sp Sz Sp Value
• APair = Sz Sp Name Sp ValCnt Sp Sz Sp Value
• Sz = 1*DIGIT
• Name = Token
• Value = Token