managing-current-user.md

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Managing a Current User

Although there are various ways to load data for the current or authenticated user, this guide describes the canonical way of doing so. The concepts described here might eventually be merged into the core Ember Simple Auth library.

current-user service

In the approach described in this guide, the current user is managed and made available to the application via a service. That service will load the current user either via an ID provided by the authenticator when authenticating the session or via a special endpoint that will always respond with the user belonging to the provided authorization token.

The service can then be injected into e.g. controllers or components that need access to the current user record, e.g.:

import Ember from 'ember';

const { inject: { service }, Component } = Ember;

export default Component.extend({
  session:     service('session'),
  currentUser: service('current-user')
});

<nav>
  {{#link-to 'index' classNames='navbar-brand'}}
    Home
  {{/link-to}}

  {{#if session.isAuthenticated}}
    <button onclick={{action 'logout'}}>Logout</button>
    {{#if currentUser.user}}
      <p>Signed in as {{currentUser.user.name}}</p>
    {{/if}}
  {{else}}
    <button onclick={{action 'login'}}>Login</button>
  {{/if}}
</nav>

Using a dedicated endpoint

In this example, the service does not need to know the ID of the current user as it uses a dedicated endpoint instead that will always respond with the user belonging to the authorization token in the request:

// app/services/current-user.js
import Ember from 'ember';

const { inject: { service }, isEmpty, RSVP } = Ember;

export default Ember.Service.extend({
  session: service('session'),
  store: service(),

  load() {
    if (this.get('session.isAuthenticated')) {
      return this.get('store').find('user', 'me').then((user) => {
        this.set('user', user);
      });
    }
  }
});

Loading the user with its id

In this example, the user is loaded by its ID. This assumes that the authenticator receives the user id when it authenticates the session so that the id is then stored in the session data and can be read from there.

// app/services/current-user.js
import Ember from 'ember';

const { inject: { service }, isEmpty, RSVP } = Ember;

export default Ember.Service.extend({
  session: service('session'),
  store: service(),

  load() {
    return new RSVP.Promise((resolve, reject) => {
      let userId = this.get('session.data.authenticated.user_id');
      if (!isEmpty(userId)) {
        this.get('store').find('user', userId).then((user) => {
          this.set('user', user);
          resolve();
        }, reject);
      } else {
        resolve();
      }
    });
  }
});

Loading the current user

The Ember Simple Auth session can either be authenticated already when the application starts up or become authenticated later when either the user logs in via that instance of the application or the session state is synced from another tab or window. In the first case, the session will already be authenticated when the application route's beforeModel method is called and in the latter case Ember Simple Auth will call the application route's sessionAuthenticated method. The currentUser service's load method must be called in both cases so that it's user property is always populated when the session is authenticated:

// app/routes/application.js
import Ember from 'ember';
import ApplicationRouteMixin from 'ember-simple-auth/mixins/application-route-mixin';

const { service } = Ember.inject;

export default Ember.Route.extend(ApplicationRouteMixin, {
  currentUser: service(),

  beforeModel() {
    return this._loadCurrentUser();
  },

  sessionAuthenticated() {
    this._super(...arguments);
    this._loadCurrentUser().catch(() => this.get('session').invalidate());
  },

  _loadCurrentUser() {
    return this.get('currentUser').load();
  }
});