Technotrance, Illusions and Perspectives

Forking navigations based on user roles in JBoss Seam using Seam-Security

October 14, 2009 at 3:49 pm (Uncategorized) (jboss-seam, seam-security)

This particular tip on loading different homepages for the role associated for a specific logged in user for a JSF web application written using JBoss Seam and identity management using Seam-Security. This tip assumes that a single user will be associated with a single role.

Assume we need to develop a course management JSF application which supports users of 2 different roles : teacher and student. This means if a user with teacher role logs in teacher specific homepage should come  and student logging in should display student homepage. The following are steps to achieve this requirement.

1) Change WEB-INF/components.xml to include the seam-security authentication patterns

<components xmlns="http://jboss.com/products/seam/components"
          ....
          xmlns:security="http://jboss.com/products/seam/security"
          xsi:schemaLocation="http://jboss.com/products/seam/security http://jboss.com/products/seam/security-2.0.xsd
                ....
          ">
 ...
 <security:identity authenticate-method="#{authenticator.authenticate}"/>
</components>

2) Define an Authenticator action class with JBoss Seam component name “authenticator” and define an authenticate method inside

@Name("authenticator")
public class AuthenticatorAction
{   @In
    private Identity identity;
    @In(create=true)
    private AuthService service;

    ...
    @SuppressWarnings("deprecated")
    public boolean authenticate()
    {   String username = identity.getUsername();
        String password = identity.getPassword();
        if(username==null || password==null)
           return false;
        //authenticate the user from database
        User user = service.authenticate(username,password);
        // check user validity.
        identity.addRole(user.getRole());
        return true;
    }
}

3) Define the login portal widget in the login-page (say login.xhtml)

<ui:composition xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 .....
   <h:panelGrid columns="2" style="width:27px">
      <h:outputText value="Username: "/>
      <h:inputText id="username" value="#{identity.username}" rows="1" cols="12">
         <f:validateLength minimum="8"  />
      </h:inputText>
      <h:outputText value="Password:" rows="1" cols="12"/>
      <h:inputSecret id="password" value="#{identity.password}" />
   </h:panelGrid>
   <h:commandButton id="login" action="#{identity.login}" value="Login"/>
    ...
 </ui:composition>

4) Wire the action outcomes to set up the navigation paths in WEB-INF/pages.xml

<pages xmlns="http://jboss.com/products/seam/pages"
       ....
       no-conversation-view-id="/index.html"> 

     <page view-id="/login.xhtml">
        <navigation from-action="#{authenticator.checkLogin}">
           <rule if="#{identity.loggedIn and identity.role=='Teacher'}">
               <redirect view-id="/teacher/homepage.xhtml" />
          </rule>
       </navigation>
       <navigation from-action="#{identity.login}">
           <rule if="#{identity.loggedIn and identity.hasRole('Teacher')}">
              <redirect view-id="/teacher/homepage.xhtml" />
          </rule>
       </navigation>
       <navigation from-action="#{authenticator.checkLogin}">
          <rule if="#{identity.loggedIn and identity.role=='Student'}">
               <redirect view-id="/student/homepage.xhtml" />
          </rule>
       </navigation>
       <navigation from-action="#{identity.login}">
           <rule if="#{identity.loggedIn and identity.hasRole('Student')}">
              <redirect view-id="/student/homepage.xhtml" />
          </rule>
       </navigation>
    </page>
    ....
   <exception>
        <redirect view-id="/index.xhtml">
           <message>Please log in first</message>
        </redirect>
   </exception>
</pages>

You can extend this tip to come out of different other user-role combinations.