I've been struggling with this issue for a little while now. Found several posts about it but none solved my problem. It will probably have something to do with the fact that a SecurityContext is boud to a specific Thread but even then I do not know how to solve it:
Consider following code to retrieve the user that was logged in:
SecurityContextHolder.getContext().getAuthentication().getPrincipal()
Running this code in a controller would return (correctly) the user logged in. Running this code from a taglib or jsp throws NPE (authentication = null). Also the spring tag does not function (presumably for the same reason).
Extract from web.xml:
<filter>
<filter-name>AcegiFilter</filter-name>
<filter-class>org.acegisecurity.util.FilterToBeanProxy</filter-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>targetClass</param-name>
<param-value>org.acegisecurity.util.FilterChainProxy</param-value>
</init-param>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>AcegiFilter</filter-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
Extract from spring security config file:
<bean id="filterChainProxy" class="org.springframework.security.util.FilterChainProxy">
<property name="filterInvocationDefinitionSource">
<value>
CONVERT_URL_TO_LOWERCASE_BEFORE_COMPARISON
PATTERN_TYPE_APACHE_ANT
/**=httpSessionIntegrationFilter,authenticationProcessingFilter,exceptionTranslationFilter,filterSecurityInterceptor
</value>
</property>
</bean>
<bean id="filterSecurityInterceptor"
class="org.springframework.security.intercept.web.FilterSecurityInterceptor">
<property name="authenticationManager" ref="authenticationManager" />
<property name="accessDecisionManager" ref="accessDecisionManager" />
<property name="alwaysReauthenticate" value="true" />
<property name="objectDefinitionSource">
<value>
CONVERT_URL_TO_LOWERCASE_BEFORE_COMPARISON
PATTERN_TYPE_APACHE_ANT
/myaccount.htm=ROLE_CUSTOMER
</value>
</property>
</bean>