Authorizing administrators and regular users in a CakePHP application - php

Question

I'm trying to write some simple functionality to distinguish between administrators and regular users in the CakePHP application I'm writing. I've changed my users table to have a field called admin which is either 0 or 1.
In AppController.php I've got a $components array set up like this:
public $components = array(
'Session',
'Auth' => array(
'authenticate' => array(
'Blowfish' => array(
'fields' => array('username' => 'email')
)
),
'loginRedirect' => array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'home'),
'logoutRedirect' => array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'home'),
'authorize' => array('Controller')
)
);
And also this method:
public function isAuthorized($user) {
// Check if admin
if(isset($this->params['admin']) && $this->Auth->user('admin') == 1) {
echo "admin";
return true;
}
// Default deny
return false;
}
When I load pages I get this error: (net::ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS): There were too many redirects.. For some reason the code above is causing infinite redirects and I can't work out why.
Also, I've set up a routing prefix for admin so administrators can access URLs like /admin/users/edit. When I go to that page, I don't get infinite redirects and admin is echo'd out like it should be.
I've read up on tutorials online and read the Cake docs but they all seem to end with the infinite redirects, how can I set this up so that I can distinguish administrators from regular users, and deny/allow access to certain actions for each role?

Answer 1

Sixthpoint has already pointed this out.
In absence of the Auth object, the Auth component is redirecting to the Pages Controller and I think you are missing
public function beforeFilter() {
parent::beforeFilter();
$this->Auth->allow("*"); // * or array("actions", "that", "are", "allowed")
}
So, this is essentially creating an infinite loop, First Auth object is missing, it gets directed to PagesController. The Auth component has been configured to authorize all Controllers, incl PagesController. And the loop reiterates redirecting again to PagesController.
Have you tried looking into ACL ? You can accomplish the same by use of Roles coupled with ACL.