Building my first web app using Yii and wondering if it is best to include the user registration process as part of my UserController or is it better to create a registrationController and keep the logic separated?
And ...on the same line of thought, would it be beneficial to have a profileController to handle additional user information, or just have the userController handle that as well?
Is a registration the creation of a User?
Similarly is a profile just a view or update of a User?
It seems like these could all fit one controller fairly well as basic CRUD operations.
In my opinion you can make it to the UserController because the notion of registration is to create a new user. So I think you can make Register same with Create.
Actually, they are not very complex and could be in one controller. It is at least my own habit to include CRUD in one controller(Maybe my apps do not involve complex logic)
Does this form require the user to enter data that is not permanently stored in the dataabse? If so then you should create a new model derived from CFormModel rather than ActiveRecord. Your site controller can handle the launching of the CFormModel views which then take care of themselves (validation, ajax, whatever) if they don't need any dynamic interaction with server (LoginForm) or they can have a separate controller if more complex interaction is needed (RegisterForm). In a CFormModel you can access the user input during the session and process/store it however you like, but then it disappears when the user is done. See the LoginForm and RegisterForm for the blog demo, as example patterns.
Does this form have as much dynamic data interaction with other models as it does with User (not just one-off cascading of relationships)? In that case it might be best to create that separate RegisterController you mention. That's what the blog demo does, and it's a pretty simple app.
You can use gii to automatically create the CRUD interface for admin's and community moderators/managers from your User model. You can then customize it and renderPartial it whenever you want to reuse one of those views for a non-admin user. The validation rules in the models carry over too. Only guests and normally-privileged users need the dumbed down interface of a LoginForm and RegisterForm.
Good idea is to put user related stuff in module, so you could use it easy in different app. In that module you could put profile, or other user related controllers without clutttering app.
Related
I have a project which includes admin and user section. Both section use the same controllers, just different functions and templates (ex: viewAdmin() and viewUser()). In function beforeRender() of every controllers, I set variable $admin as true for admin functions and false for user functions.
For authentication, I use Shibboleth. Shibboleth uses data from LDAP, while user types were saved in SQL-Database, that means while it can check if the login and password are false, it can't check if the user is admin or not. An user can go to ADMIN section as long as they use the right action (ex: go to the link http://example.com/tool/viewAdmin).
To prevent this, I will have to:
Load model Users
Compare the environment variable uid (login name) with the "login" columns in Users table in my SQL-Database
See the "type" column in Users table to know if user is admin or not.
Compare the result with value of $admin and redirect to an error page when necessary.
The problem is: I don't want to repeat those steps for EVERY controllers.
Currently I have 2 ideas:
Write a function in UsersController, and use it in every controllers.
Create a component and load it in every controllers.
Both methods require me changing code in all controllers. I would like to hear a better way with less work, perhaps by changing app.php or bootstrap.php.
Any suggestion is appreciated.
To share methods in CakePHP controllers you can do:
Create component and include in controller
Or create method in AppController and use it in child controllers
Or PHP way create Trait.
But when you authorize users, then all user data is stored in session, incl. is user roles (example admin, regular, member,.. )
Use the official CakePHP authentication plugin and extend the LDAP adapter with the additional code check you need. This is very easy to do and also a very clean way of solving the problem. Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of the authentication plugin. https://github.com/cakephp/authentication
Or if you want to stay agnostic to any framework, use my library that is based on the authentication plugin and was decoupled from any framework but still works just nice with Cake https://github.com/Phauthentic/authentication.
I am new to MVC, just a few doubt
I think "attributeLabels" should belongs to VIEW.
Because it is not a logic rule of data, It's about presentation of data.
I wonder why the login and authenticate is put in MODEL is good idea.
I will consider that there should be only one design of "How to login" or "What will you check when user login" in the whole site. I am not sure, but I feels like the Customization of "login and authenticate" should be some where out of MCV, like "protected/config/main.php". Or separate in someWhere. login and authenticate in MODEL quite strange in my concept.
If you put the attributeLabels in view, then every time u create a view (create,edit etc) using that model, u need to define the labels each time. Anyway there are ways to give label names in view. And it's not only in yii, in asp.net mvc, the name is also defined in model.
The login username,password comes from the query through the database models. So u need a controller and view for LoginForm.php. This is a reason to put it in models i believe.
I am creating a login & registration system using CodeIgniter.
Currently I have a Model, View and Controller for login, with functions to validate,
check username, etc and an registration model, view and controller,
that does the registration.
I have chosen to separate the login and registration as a principle.
So right now i need to include functions to edit profile, and to check if logged in or not, and to check the user's role, and I would like to know how can i best do this, i have planned creating a user model and controller(no view), the main user controller would have the methods call to model's, but however the methods(updateprofile,islogin,etc) would be in different models, for example in the login model.
So is this design good/bad? How can it be done better. I would appreciate your suggestion's.
I really find no problem with your application structure. Its how you write your code and how will it easily be to update it in the future. For managing your models try using an ORM. PHPActiveRecord is a good start. With this, you no longer be creating alot of individual functions for your database transactions. Reference
You can create a User_Model and expand it as needed. You can see this CI auth lib for example as how build login & registration structure in CodeIgniter.
I'm wondering what is best in my case. I'm building a site using CodeIgniter with two main sections:
the public part avalaible to everyone
the private one only for registered users
In each page of the public area (one controller) I want to put a sign in form and a sign up link and if the users is logged in he has to be redirected to the private area or a link to it may be shown.
Now I have two choices:
A user controller is the first thing I thought of but in each page of the site I need to control if the user is logged and this is impossible or very bad since I'm using another Controller
So I started working on a library but I'm not sure how implement it (for example form validation should be achieved by the controller or by the library itself?, what about database connection since I haven't a model?)
What do you think is the best? Why? and how would you implement it?
(and yes I like reinventing the wheel and not using an existing library mainly because i want to learn how to do it)
Super Controller
=>assign user data,settings,configs etc
|-----private controller extends super controller
=>check user credentials
|-----admin controller extends super controller
=>check user && admin credentials
Your super controller is your public controller as long as you only do assignments, no checking...
Anything you want public just extends super controller
Anything you want private extends private controller
Form validations and query jobs should be carried out with the controller itself. The library act like a tool no need to implement these things in them but as a need you can use queries in them to check some data but it's better to be worked in the controllers.
The idea for having a log flag is to:
When user is signed in, create a session for it to show the access.
Check every time the session for the private parts.
I am trying to create a login system thats generic so that it can be adapted for use in various apps. I decided that 2 main "parts" of the system will be User Meta Data & Roles/Resources/ACL.
1. Metadata
I thought of keeping most data like what meta data are available for users in the database, so that admins can manage them using some GUI.
Problem is how can I then configue how I want inputs to render (textbox, checkbox, radios etc.). Then another problem is validation, filters.
2. ACL
I think for simple ACL it will work fine. But suppose I want say users to be able to modify posts they own. In Zend_ACL that is accomplished with Assertions. I thought that will make a "simple" login system overlly complex? Also it will be hard to build I suppose?
Currently I have my database like
Logging in users: I recommend using a separate controller (call it Auth for instance) that has loginAction and logoutAction. Zend_Auth (Zend_Auth using database) will check the database for the right credentials. Once the user is verified, you will save it in the global accessible place(the Zend_Auth class has methods to do this). This is also a good moment to query which roles the user has and store them.
Metadata part of your application: I'm not sure what the question is exactly but I assume you want to store dynamic information about user and have a GUI for admins to manage this. Why you would render different types of controls? Validating the information can be done by defining a lot of the most common metadata (like Twitter) and create rules for them. In the save action for the metadata you would validate using these rules.
ACL: Resources rarely change, you are better off putting them in a configuration file (for speed). You should give a lot thought to resources: what are they exactly to you? Controllers? Modules? Create a plugin that will preDispatch every request checking the role of the logged in user against the requested resource. E.g.:
$action = $request->getActionName();
$controller = $request->getControllerName();
// role, resource, privilage
if (!$acl->isAllowed($user->role, $controller, $action) {
//go to access denied page!
}
Now that Zend_ACL is used for the global access rules, you are better off checking for specific access inside the action itself (like if ($loggedInUser == $article->author) {//edit the article};).
Also don't forget Zend_ACL can be integrated with Zend_Navigation to hide menu items users are not allowed to use (and more).