Automatic web login

Background

All of the web pages and scripts that TIM Plus serves are protected by a login that is provided by a user when entering their username and password into a pop-up dialog presented by their web browser.

In some situations, it is desirable to suppress this dialog box demanding the username and password. An example might be the deployment of a stand-alone computer displaying a pre-defined wallboard on a large screen; it would become tedious having to log in to the web page every time that computer is restarted.

Different web browsers behave differently when asked to automatically log in to web sites. Variously, they range from complete prohibition of the practise to permitting it only if certain system parameters are configured.

Specifics

In this article, details of how to allow automatic logging-in to a web page concerns the Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 6 and above) browsers only. Please consult your browser documentation for a solution related to your own choice of browser.

The solution involves creating a specially-crafted URL in the following form:-

Solution

Although including the username and password in a URL is disabled by default on Windows Internet Explorer since it is considered a security risk, you can override this restriction by making the following changes to the Windows Registry.

Since you'll be exposing a username and password as part of a URL, it is recommended that you create a dedicated web user object inside the TIM Plus directory that will be used solely for this purpose.  See the Web users page for details of how to set up a web user.

Open Windows Registry Editor, REGEDIT.EXE, from the Windows Start Menu ? Run. Locate the following registry key:-

Close the Registry Editor and create a bookmark in Internet Explorer, specifying the URL as per the following example:-

Replace the following items:-

• USERNAME replace with the username of the web user you use to access the page
• PASSWORD replace with the password of the web user you use to access the page
• HOSTNAME replace with the host name or IP address of the machine running TIM Plus

References

This information is available in more detail at the Microsoft Support site:-