SAFIRE Test Service Provider

The test service provider allows you to see what personal information your home identity provider will send to the South African Identity Federation. To help you better understand what personal information your identity provider is sending, this test service provider always requests all of SAFIRE's supported attributes from your provider. This is very unusual, and most service providers will only ever see a subset of this information.

For those interested in the technical details of what this test page is doing, it demonstrates three different federated login methods. All three mechanisms ultimately log into the same place, but provide very different user experiences.

  • The big blue button above implements the recent guidelines resulting from the RA21 initiative. It is using the standard flavour of the Seamless Access discovery service, and is SAFIRE's current best practice.
  • The "Institutional Login" on the top right of the page demonstrates local discovery using the Shibboleth embedded discovery service with the link placed top-right as recommended in the older REFEDS discovery guide. While this form of local discovery is not our recommended practice, the placing of the login button does mirror the positioning of login links in many social providers and is thus still intuitive for most users. The "Institutional Login" terminology also makes it clear to users that they should use their home institution credentials.
  • The "[Log In via SAFIRE]" button below demonstrates central discovery using the SAFIRE hub's discovery service. This mechanism limits logins to South African institutions utilising SAFIRE. Its use is deprecated as local discovery mechanisms (such as the two shown here) provide a much more consistent user experience. The use of the "via SAFIRE" terminology on the button is also discouraged as end users should not be expected to know the federation's name (or anything about the federation) in order to log in with their home institution credentials.