Custom user authentication system

[Mathieu]

Hello,
We're trying to develop our own user authentication system and to
integrate it to Blacklight. It uses a TCP connection and don't need a
database. We follow the instructions on the wiki but we encounter a
problem to connect with Blacklights's bookmark. It seems to be a
problem with active record associations.
We added to User Class the line "self.abstract_class = true" to use it
without database (but it inherits from ActiveRecord anyway). It works
fine when a user authenticates but it fails with searches (when the
"existing_bookmark_for" methods is called).

Does Blacklight need a user table with a user modele to authenticate
or can we make it works without ?

thanks,
Mathieu.

[Jonathan Rochkind]

It _ought_ not to need a user table with a user model, I _think_.
However, I could be wrong, or there could be bugs in BL.

I think the easiest thing to do would be to include a User model. That
doesn't mean the user model needs to play any part in authentication --
it's just a local record of a user account in your Blacklight app.

I don't authenticate against a database either. But I do have a user
table in the database with a User active record model. Once a user is
authenticated, I have some 'unique id' for the user from my external
authentication -- I use that external ID to look up a user record in my
local table, and create one if it doesn't exist, and then set that user
record as current_user.

I would recommend that as your best bet. It _ought_ to be possible to
do what you originally described, I _think_ (but could be wrong), but
might take a lot of hacking, and possibly rearchitecting of BL somewhat
if it turns out it wasn't as flexible as we thought.

Your "user" ActiveRecord model _can_ be called something other than
User, if you want to reserve the name "User" for something else. That is
a feature in BL already, and that feature ought to be working, or ought
not to be that hard for us or you to fix if it's buggy.

Jonathan

[Mathieu]

Hello,
thanks for your reply. Sorry to be late, I was trying to test
Blacklight with a user table.
I don't succeed to integrate our user model and I have the same errors
than without user table ( message : "undefined method `[]' for
nil:NilClass" when the method "existing_bookmark_for(document.id)" is
called in document view)

Firstly, routes for /bookmarks and /saved_searches are not found.
However, when I execute the command "rake routes" these two routes are
indicated.

Do you have an idea for these problems ?

Thanks,
Mathieu

[Jonathan Rochkind]

I don't have any ideas, sorry. It's gonna take some debugging. It's
possibly a bug in BL, it's possibly something not done right in your
local app, it's possibly a documentation bug where the docs don't
accurately explain what you have to do.

Sorry.

[Jessie Keck]

Hi Mathieu,
It may also help if you put your user model and the stack trace you're seeing into a gist ( http://gist.github.com ). That can let us see the code you're working with and may help us figure out what is happening.

Thanks,
- Jessie

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[Mathieu]

Hi,
I found a solution for user model. It was a bug when initializing a
user object, now it works!

But routes for bookmarks and saved_searches don't work. I made an
update of the local applications with blacklight 3.4.2 but it seems to
have no effect. In the output of command "rake routes", bookmarks ans
saved_searches are indicated.

This is my routes.rb file :
https://gist.github.com/2781198

thanks,
Mathieu.

On 23 mai, 18:20, Jessie Keck <jk...@stanford.edu> wrote:
> Hi Mathieu,

> It may also help if you put your user model and the stack trace you're seeing into a gist (http://gist.github.com).  That can let us see the code you're working with and may help us figure out what is happening.

[Mathieu]

Hello,
It's ok now. In my User controller I have a current_user method but
It's better to put it in application controller to work fine with
bookmarks.

Thanks,
Mathieu.