Symfony, action accessible by forward only - model-view-controller

Is it possible to prevent direct access to an action in symfony. The action is only accessible by "forward" only. So basically, a way to see if the request is coming from another action.
I'm trying to achieve this because the first action handles plenty of verifications then if it fails, it stays on that action. If it succeed, it will forward to an appropriate action; this action needs to have safe inputs (validated from the first action). In order to keep the code DRY, the second action doesn't need to re-verify all the inputs again.
Then why not doing simply a private method? The second action is sort of a plugin, it's decided on the fly where it's going from the first one, that action has its own set of other future action/template. It makes more sense to simply forward instead of trying to handle plenty of cases that Symfony already takes care of.

There are multiple ways to achieve this.
1) Make sure your action isn't accessible by the routing. If you have wildcard routes this will be harder, but you can always add a route which would point the url for your action to a 404 page. Add something like this to your routing.yml:
disabled_action:
url: /disabledController/disabledAction
params: { module: default, action: error404 }
2) Check the action stack upon executing your action. The action stack let's you know from which action you were redirected. You can access it within your action using $this->getController()->getActionStack(). If the getSize() is bigger than 1 (in a default configuration) you we're forwarded.

Use referrer parameter available in request
$request->getReferer() will give you full url of previous action

I'm curious why you're trying to achieve this. Are you looking to have multiple points of access that forward to this action? What if you simply defined a private method (which by default aren't web-accessible) and called it directly from another action?

Related

Setting Absolute Uri in MVC 3

Is it possible to set the absoluteURI in the controller after clicking on an action link? So for example:
User clicks on a link called "GoHere". The current URL is domain.com/section/place. When the link hits the method in the controller, it recognizes that the user is currently in a section called "section", even though in the file structure section doesn't exist. The link itself actually points to domain.com/place2. Instead of returning a URL of domain.com/place2, it returns domain.com/section/place2.
The reason I ask is because for what I'm doing, the section is completely arbitrary and doesn't exist. It's just there to give the impression that the user is in another section. I know I could create extra sets of controllers, but I'm trying to get around this since for management purposes it's better if I just have one set of controllers. Is this possible? Thanks.
In your gobal.asax, try setting your route to require section for the control. Maybe "{control}/section/{action}/" and whatever else you need.

When using Url.RouteUrl, the area is missing

I suspect I'm doing this wrong.
For various reasons, my app forces the user to make some choices right after login. In order to ensure that they enter the necessary data, I override the OnActionExecuting method in a base controller class to intercept any attempt at executing an action before this data has been entered, and redirect the user to the necessary page. I preserve the url of the action they were attempting to execute with the following code:
url = Url.RouteUrl("Default", filterContext.RouteData.Values);
(filterContext is an ActionExecutingContext object, and a parameter of OnActionExecuting.)
The problem I'm having is that, if the action was associated with a controller in an area, the url I get doesn't reflect the area.
I understand from other posts that I can get the area name from the DataTokens collection of RouteData. But I'm uncertain of the best way to pass it. I suppose I could retrieve it and use the RouteValueDictionary.Add method to add it to RouteData.Values (assuming Values is not read-only at that point; I don't know), but that feels a bit ... odd, like somehow the point is being missed.
Is this really the way this is supposed to be done? Is there something wrong elsewhere, that Area is absent from my RouteData.Values?
I would just take it out of the data tokens in the filter and add it to route values. You can do it with RouteValues.Add:
if (filterContext.RouteData.DataTokens.ContainsKey("area"))
filterContext.RouteData.Values.Add("area",
filterContext.RouteData.DataTokens["area"]);
The areas feature was added in MVC2, and I imagine this is a side effect of it not being in MVC1. However, as long as your RouteValues contains an "area" key, UrlHelper.RouteUrl should generate the correct URL for the area.

Hiding Query String Parameters

I have a GET action for creating records. Because the page is somewhat dynamic, I don't use a model to hold the data. I go off to do some OAuth, only to return to the create screen later on. In order to pass the data back, I am redirecting with a query string. I parse the query string in the GET action, and then show the view. The thing is, the query string is showing up in the browser. This displays pseudo-sensitive data.
Since I am only using the query string for transferring data, I am wondering if I can throw the query string away to prevent it from showing up on the browser.
Otherwise, is there a way to go to another action without redirecting? I've found, if I call the "other" action method directly, it tries to find the view of the original action. I can explicitly change the return View(viewModel) line to return View("create", viewModel) but that seems really dirty.
You should consider changing the action to accept POST requests. At least this will prevent the sensitive information from appearing in the browser. For extra security, your site should be served via SSL.
The other thing you can try is encrypting the sensitive values or the entire query string. The only problem is that this, too, will be preserved in the browser's history unless you require users to log in.
It looks like your action method is trying to do too much. Authentication/authorization is a separate concern which should not be part of the action method. It is better to move the authentication work in to an action filter.
Create an class that extends authorization attribute and override its OnAuthorization method to do your authorization work.
This frees your controller action method to accept POST requests.

Is There A Downside To Calling Models From Helpers In CakePHP?

A bit of context: I need to cache the homepage of my CakePHP site - apart from one small part, which displays events local to the user based on their IP address.
You can obviously use the <cake:nocache> tag to dictate a part of the page that shouldn't be cached; but you can't surround a controller-set variable with these tags to make it dynamic. Once a page is cached, that's it for the controller action, as far as I know.
What you can usefully surround with the nocache tags are elements and helpers. As such, I've created an element inside these tags, which calls a helper function to access the model and get the appropriate data. To get at the model from the helper I'm using:
$this->Modelname =& ClassRegistry::init("Modelname");
This seems to me, however, to be a kind of iffy way of doing things, both in terms of CakePHP and general MVC principles. So my question is, is this an appropriate way of getting what I want to do done, or should it ring warning bells? Is there a much better way of achieving my objectives that I'm just missing here?
Rather than using a Helper, try to put your code in an element and use requestAction inside of the element.
see this link
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/gwoo/2007/04/12/creating-reusable-elements-with-requestaction
This would be a much better approach than trying to use a model in your helper.
Other than breaking all the carefully-laid principles of MVC?
In addition to putting this item into an element, why not fetch it with a trivial bit of ajax?
Put the call in its own controller action, such that the destination URL -> /controller/action (quite convenient!)
Pass the IP back to that action for use in the find call
Set the ajax update callback to target within the element with the results of the call accordingly
No need to muck around calling Models directly from Views, and no need to bog things down with requestAction. :)
HTH

Redirect CI problem

I'm kind of new with CodeIgniter and I'm still learning (a lot).
So I have a view and when I submit a form I 'call' the controller by surfing to the right URL dynamically e.g. site/delete
class Site extends Controller {
function index(){$this->load->view('...')}
function delete() {
$this->site_model->delete_row();
$this->index();
}
}
Now when that action is done (deleted the row) I'm calling $this->index(); to redirect to my initial page (which is good) but my url stays: site/delete . I want my URL to be ../site/index (or without the /index)
Any help would be appreciated :-) .
So far I found something to solve this:
instead of:
$this->index();
I'm using:
redirect('site');
Does anyone know this is a good practice?
Redirect is what you should use.
In the user guide:
http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/helpers/url_helper.html
they use it after checking if a user is logged in. Depending on if they are or not, they redirect to a different place.
Also, note that any code after the redirect won't run. Make sure and redirect after you've done everything you need to.
My preferred method is to have actions like that handled by the same method that will be seen by the user afterwards.
What if you go to /site/delete afterwards, as a user? It will either have to detect and throw a error (show a message) or redirect to an appropriate page. /site/delete has no meaning.
For example, if a user would normally see an overview after deleting, then my form will be posted to /site/index; with index quickly checking for the condition and calling _delete() in the same controller, before doing its normal work.
That way, if the user refreshes the page, or presses 'back', things should look consistent to them.
Another example would be that /settings/edit would post to itself - this means that it can act on the post and show any output (e.g. validation errors). It means there's no /settings/do_edit location on my site, and also means that the user can go back to /settings/edit safely, and see a form for editing their settings.
I suppose this is a subjective take on a perhaps objective question, and I would encourage feedback on my view, but it's my way of avoiding the problem you have asked about.
$this->index();
Call of function in a function simply execute the functionality within that function.
And url never changed.
for changing the url you should use.
redirect ( base_url().'site');
but you should load url helper in constructor.

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