Hi good morning to everyone
currently I am working in spring. I am searching long time to work with session but somebody told use Model And View instead of session which is right way for maintain user status and give some referral link for session tracking.
There is no relation between (Model & view) and session, Both are two different things.
Model and view is used to pass data from controller to view(interaction between controller and view). we need to create different model and view objects for different operations (CRUD operations) in a web application.
In case of session if we wanted to store any object, object type,variables and want to use those for entire application for that particular session. Then we can go for session. This can be done by using annotation of #Scope("session") or we can configure in spring configuration file.
If you want to maintain user details for a particular session you can use session. If your requirement is to show the user details from database in view then you can use Model and view in controller.
I want to know how can I force a user to log in the the application again if the page is being opened in new tab or new browser.
Edit:-
My apologies I misunderstood the requirement.
I am authenticating the user in my log-in page but not anywhere else. So what is happening because of that, even if i log out of application and type url say bla.com/apple I can access my application.
I figured to prevent this from happening, I have to write a base controller that checks for the right user. Am I moving in the right direction.
Thanks
Addressing the edit -
Authentication can be handled per controller or on individual actions. Simple place the [Authorize] attribute appropriately. This assumes however that somewhere an authentication token is being set. [Authorize] checks against the HttpContext's current User (an IPrincipal).
You mentioned above that you're just validating against a local username and password, in one place, so I'm guessing that no token (session, cookie) are being set?
You have a few options here to get that token stored and persisted across requests:
ASP.Net integrated membership provider (Intro)
A custom MembershipProvider (Example)
Full-on custom flow. (Example)
Each has ups and downs and depends on how exactly you want to handle on-boarding your users. It's hard to answer more specifically because it can be a very large topic (and a very broad question).
Here's the official pages for MVC security.
I was wondering if session handling like authentication and signing in is best handled by the User Model (assuming a user model refers to a user) and has attributes such as email and password. Or should session handling be held by another model?
What exactly is the best way to do this - I have code pretty much strewn partially in controllers in function files and want to refactor my code to adhere more to MVC principles. My project is based on the Zend Framework.
In MVC concept, the model represents the business part of your application.
Manage authentication, saving, deleting, activating of an user are business issues.
So it makes sense to create a method authenticate, save, delete, activate directly in your user model.
So in your user model, it is preferable to implement static methods as
public static function authenticate ($ username, $ password)
{
$authService = $this-> getServiceLocator()->get('Zend\Authentication\AuthenticationService');
$adapter = $authService->getAdapter();
$adapter->setIdentityValue($username);
$adapter->setCredentialValue($password);
$authResult = $authService->authenticate();
return $authResult->isValid();
}
And in your controller, you can directly do:
User/Entity/User::authenticate($username, $password);
I view authentication and session management as application-level concerns.
One general criterion I often apply is this: "Could I use my models in another app (perhaps a commandline app) or another website?
For example, in your circumstance, I would view a User model as representing a user. That user exists irrespective of whether or not he is actually visiting and/or logging in/out of your website. He could be referenced in a commandline app (Ex: a cron job that sends email to all users on their birthday; a reporting utility that counts all users that have incomplete profiles); etc. As such, I would keep authentication session management at the controller-level or perhaps one level down in a service level.
But as in most things, YMMV.
I'm writing a web application with some ACL requirements: a user can make changes to some items, some items may be editable by several users, administrator can edit anything and a manager can edit everything within her organization etc.
I'm using the Play! framework, and by the looks of the Secure module, it seems that the place to put authorization concerns is in the Controllers. However, it seems to me that the authorization issues are part of the business logic, and therefore should be in the model. Furthermore, I'm starting to see duplicated logic in the controllers that I need to refactor out.
On the other hand, adding authorization to the model means that I'd have to have some way of getting the current user from within the model, which doesn't seem right. Alternatively, I could add a "current_user" parameter to every model method, but that seems even worse.
So what is the common practice? Can/should I put authorization code in the model, or keep it in the controller?
I think this is a grey area. One could argue that the user access is part of the mapping between the HTTP world and the Object-Oriented world. This is what the controller is intended for (hence the heavy use of statics), to transform the incoming request, ready to process the business rules on the domain model.
I would suggest that the controller logic is absolutely the right place for controlling the access to the model, especially as this is managed largely at an annotation level, and the authentication is abstracted off to a Security class.
Authorization should neither be part of controller or domain model.
Instead it should be in the service layer.
Controller should just act as dispatcher and delegate between HTTP and application service.
It's the application service where the orchestration takes place. This is the best place for placing authorization.
Suppose user A is authorized to access data from domain X, but not authorized for even a read access for data from domain Y. If authorization is placed in the controller, then user A gets authorized in the controller X, and via the service calls can access data from domain Y, which is not what we expected.
Since domain models communicate with each other on service layer, hence it best to place the authorization on the same level.
In most cases, the security should be one (or more) layer above the Model. Security is a domain on it's own, restricting access to a lower level layer.
I don't think the security should be done at the controller level.
In my opinion, this should look like that:
View -> Controller -> Security -> Model
The security layer could be a façade or a proxy over the model, protecting access, but be transparent to the controller.
However, if the views are to be modified depending on the access rights of the user, some checks might have to happen at the controller level (like setting the value of a CanEdit boolean property on the ViewModel).
I personally really like the way the Play! Secure module handles this (the tutorial is ever-helpful here). If you don't mind using the #Before annotation, it's pretty painless.
I am at this stage and intending to handle this in the following way:
No form validation by JS, instead via HTTPS ajax
An Ajax php class
Form data sent to a model as its data for concrete validation for
common type such as email and password (likely assoc array validation will be reused by other classes so this is definately a model area).
if no error a lookup in a User table for the credentials email /
password credentials passed to a Controller with the authentication
type such as login / signup / password reset
the controller then produces the required output view or sets user logged in session etc
This is based in Laravel but I have my own library as want it independent of laravel and just loosely based for this vital requirement.
The point being that the Model looks up the required credentials as data, then sends to the Controller as it does not care how it should be processed. I think this is the only way to make this area a definitive responsibility between each of the components.
From my personal experience with MVC frameworks I would say:
Model is an object that is representing database table it should be
pure and should not contain any additional logic.
Controller is the place where are made the decisions and other
custom logic, so the authorization should be in the controller. It
could be designed some hook that can check if the user is authorized
or not in all needed places so you wont have a code repetition DRY.
The best way to give permission to user if you are using a typical
REST architecture is to make a token , save it in the databse and on
client side and verify this token on every request. If you are using
web browser app you can use server-side sessions for authorization (
Its much more easier).
So my propose is to keep the authorization logic in the Controller.
I'll use Rails as an example. The authorization library, pundit, places authorization firmly within the "model" domain - this is enforced through their helper methods.
Suppose you have a ShoppingBag model. You might want to create a ShoppingBag
class ShoppingBagController
def create
authorize ShoppingBag.new, current_user
end
end
It works really well if you have a 1-1 mapping between a model and a controller. But what if you need a second controller on the same model? Now you're stuck!
class DiscountedShoppingBagController
def create
authorize ShoppingBag.new, current_user # does not work for us. we want a slightly different authorization, on the same model.
end
end
It's for that reason I dislike pundit, and CanCanCan. Authorization at the controller level, for me, is ideal. Doing so on the model level limits me too much, without any commensurate gain.
I'm looking at creating my first ASP.NET MVC application using MVC3.
The project template I used included some models for registering users, logging in and updating a forgotten password.
I want users to be authenticated against my own data store (probably using Entity Framework) and using google OAuth.
I assumed that I'd want a User model class that contained a few standard properties and some business logic which handled the "local" authentication and the OAuth call but the project template has confused me.
Should I be creating multiple view-models for different actions like Login, Register, etc and then using the controller to instantiate and invoke my model to perform the business logic or should I use my User model for all the different actions?
Thanks
Ben
Should I be creating multiple
view-models for different actions like
Login, Register, etc and then using
the controller to instantiate and
invoke my model to perform the
business logic or should I use my User
model for all the different actions?
View model per view. That's the rule. There might even be 2 view models per view (one for rendering data in the GET and one for receiving data from the view in the POST action). Don't be shy in creating view models. You definitely shouldn't be using a User model for all different actions, that would be catastrophic. The model should be used by your service layer. A User model will be manipulated by this layer, and never passed to a view.
You may also checkout AutoMapper for mapping between your model classes and view models. It's a great tool and comes in handy especially when the number of view models start to increase.