Always consider the date and version of other posts that you read.  That post is from 2004, and is currently not correct.  In WebGUI 6.99.0, the group code was changed.  Instead of doing a lookup by userId and returning 1, the SQL query is supposed to return a list of userIds.

This was documented in the gotchas file (docs/gotchas.txt), in the online help for the Add/Edit Group form, and in the hoverHelp in the Edit Group form itself.  I've explained to you how to access the online help before, but you may not have stumbled across the hoverHelp.

In almost every form in WebGUI, if you place your mouse over the label for a form field, a little box will pop-up with help for that form field.  In this case, it would have shown you this:

 Many organizations have external databases that map users to groups; for example an HR database might map Employee ID to Health Care Plan.  To validate users against an external database, you need to construct an SQL statement that will return the list of WebGUI userIds for users in the group.  You may use macros in this query to access data in a user's WebGUI profile, such as Employee ID.  Here is an example that checks a user against a fictional HR database.  This assumes you have created an additional WebGUI profile field called employeeId

Closing this as not a bug.

Replying to a closed bug automatically reopens it.

You can't expect to get help from poorly written bug reports.  You quoted old help which doesn't currently describe how WebGUI works.

In any case, let's restate the case and see what we can do to help you out.

You want to write a single sign-on system that pulls a value out of a cookie and then checks to see if that value exists in an external database.  However, whether or not the user has the cookie, it considers them as the Visitor user and presents them with a logon screen.

Have you made sure that your SQL query is correct?

Have you made sure that the data is pulled out of the cookie and placed correctly in the query? 

And if you'd like some realtime help for this, hop onto the WebGUI IRC channel. 

Ok. I created two macro to check my sanity.

my $session = shift;
        my $output;
        my $gid = "GoQ2Dm_PER6H2hoW9FwFlg";
        #isInGroup is from Users.pm
        return $session->user->isInGroup($gid);

always return 0 (false) when logged in as visitor even though the query returns 1 which is the uid of the visitor.

So then I created this macro to call getDatabaseUsers to verify what it's returning.  but this just returns returns just "eggs"

my $session = shift;
        my $output;
        my $gid = "GoQ2Dm_PER6H2hoW9FwFlg";

        my $g = WebGUI::Group->new($session,$gid);

        my @users = ();
        #getDatabaseUsers is from Groups.pm
        push @users, @{$g->getDatabaseUsers() }, "eggs" ;
        foreach my $uid (@users) {
             $output .= $uid."</br/>";
        }
        return $output;

So I'm concluding that when the list of users is retrieved from a sql-based qroup via via getDatabaseUsers function, the uid of "1" is somehow ignored.

Again, I verfied the SQL with SQLreport and it does return "1" correctly.

I just don't know perl enough to find the offending code that ignores the "1".

Thanks!