Shameless Plug I'll be speaking at EmberConf next month, hope to see you there!

A while back, Gabe showed us an approach to handling authentications in AngularJS. This is a good opportunity to compare the similarity and differences between AngularJS and Ember.js, so in this blog post, we will look at how you would achieve the same thing with Ember.js.

It is worth mentioning that there are plenty of plugins and tutorials on the same topic in the Ember world. However, for comparison’s sake, let’s build this example from scratch.

The task

JS Bin

Similar to Gabe’s example, we will be building a single page app that hosts a mix of public and protected content. When the user tries to access a protected page, the app should present a login screen. Just like the Angular counterpart, the server might choose to reject the authentication anytime (e.g. expired session), in which case the app should present the login screen and ask the user for their credentials again.

In addition, we will also handle a basic authorization scenario where one of the protected pages can only be accessed by admin users. On top of all that, we will be a good citizen on the web and ensure our URLs and browser history works correctly throughout the app (e.g. the back button, bookmarking, opening links in new tab, sharing links to specific pages should all work as expected).

Finally, to keep things simple, we will opt for regular transitions instead of modal dialogs.

The completed app is available on as a JS bin, so go ahead and poke around!

Alternatively, you can also access the code on Github. The Github version uses Ember CLI so there are some minor differences in syntax and code organization. It also comes with a complete test suite, so be sure to check that out!

Step 1: Building the API client

For our app to work, we will need an API that supports the following operations:

An endpoint to authenticate users by their credentials, in exchange for a session token. (e.g. a POST request to /session with the user’s username and password.)

An endpoint to access a public resource. (e.g. a GET request to /public )

An endpoint to access a protected resource that is only available when authenticated. (e.g. a GET request to /protected with a valid session token)

An endpoint to access the admin-only resource. (e.g. a GET request to /secret with an appropriate session token)

An endpoint to explicitly destroy a session (e.g. a DELETE request to /session with a session token)

This should be fairly straight forward to implement with your choice of server- side technology. For our purpose, we will mock it out with the Pretender library:

// mock-server.js var server = new Pretender ( function () { this . post ( '/session' , function ( request ) { switch ( request . requestBody ) { case 'username=admin&password=secret' : return [ 201 , { 'Content-Type' : 'application/json' }, '{"token":"admin","user":{"role":"admin","name":"Administrator"}}' ]; case 'username=user&password=secret' : return [ 201 , { 'Content-Type' : 'application/json' }, '{"token":"user","user":{"role":"user","name":"User"}}' ]; default : return [ 401 , {}, 'Incorrect username/password' ]; } }); this . delete ( '/session' , function () { return [ 200 , {}, 'You are logged out' ]; }); this . get ( '/public' , function () { return [ 200 , {}, 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet' ]; }); this . get ( '/protected' , function ( request ) { switch ( request . requestHeaders [ 'Authorization' ]) { case 'Token token=user' : case 'Token token=admin' : return [ 200 , {}, 'Since you can see this, you must be logged in!' ]; case 'Token token=expired' : return [ 401 , {}, 'Your session has expired' ]; default : return [ 401 , {}, 'Please login to access this page' ]; } }); this . get ( '/secret' , function ( request ) { switch ( request . requestHeaders [ 'Authorization' ]) { case 'Token token=user' : return [ 403 , {}, 'You are not allowed to access this page' ]; case 'Token token=admin' : return [ 200 , {}, 'Since you can see this, you must be an admin!' ]; case 'Token token=expired' : return [ 401 , {}, 'Your session has expired' ]; default : return [ 401 , {}, 'Please login to access this page' ]; } }); });

To access this API, we will write a simple API client for it:

// api.js var API = { token : null , login : function ( username , password ) { var self = this ; var payload = { username : username , password : password }; var deferred = jQuery . post ( '/session' , payload ). then ( function ( data ) { self . token = data . token ; return data . user ; }, function ( error ) { return { status : error . statusText , message : error . responseText }; } ); return Ember . RSVP . resolve ( deferred ); }, logout : function () { var self = this ; var settings = { type : 'DELETE' , headers : { 'Authorization' : 'Token token=' + this . token } }; var deferred = jQuery . ajax ( '/session' , settings ). then ( function () { self . token = null ; }); return Ember . RSVP . resolve ( deferred ); }, get : function ( resource ) { var url = '/' + resource ; var settings ; if ( this . token ) { settings = { headers : { 'Authorization' : 'Token token=' + this . token } }; } else { settings = {}; } var deferred = jQuery . ajax ( url , settings ). then ( null , function ( error ) { return { status : error . statusText , message : error . responseText }; }); return Ember . RSVP . resolve ( deferred ); } };

Nothing too exciting so far (and none of these are specific to Ember.js). The only thing worth mentioning is that we are turning jQuery’s deferred objects into “real” Promises via RSVP.js, which happens to be one of Ember’s dependencies.

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

Step 2: Adding the index page

Now that we have the API client figured out, we can move on to setting up our Ember app and a simple index page. This will be the page that greets our users when they first visit our app. From here, we will link to the different sections of our app.

// app.js App = Ember . Application . create ();

{{!-- templates/appliction.hbs --}} <h2> Ember.js Authentication Example </h2> {{ outlet }}

{{!-- templates/index.hbs --}} <p> Public Page </p> <p> Protected Page </p> <p> Admin-only Page </p>

Here, we have a bare-bone Ember app setup with a simple app-wide layout (the template called “application” will be rendered on every page, and the page’s template will be inserted into the {{outlet}} placeholder). If you are familiar with Rails, you can think of application.hbs as the application’s “layout”, where {{outlet}} is analogous to <%= yield %> .

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

When you launch the app in your browser, you should see the index template being rendered. Clicking on the links doesn’t do anything yet, though, so let’s fix it!

Step 3: Adding the public page

To render the public page, we want to call API.get('public'); to fetch the data we need to populate the page. Because we don’t need to authenticate with the server, this is pretty straight forward:

// router.js App . Router . map ( function () { this . route ( 'public' ); });

// routes/public.js App . PublicRoute = Ember . Route . extend ({ model : function () { return API . get ( 'public' ); } });

{{!-- templates/index.hbs --}} <p> {{ #link - to "public" }} Public Page {{ /link - to }} </p> <p> Protected Page </p> <p> Admin-only Page </p>

{{!-- templates/public.hbs --}} <h4> Public Page </h4> <div id= "content" > {{ content }} </div> <p> {{ #link - to "index" }} Go back {{ /link - to }} </p>

By returning a Promise in our route (which is what API.get returns), the Ember router is smart enough to wait for it to resolve (or reject) before attempting to render the page. This architecture spares us from having to worry about the async nature of the data-fetching operations, so we can simply refer to the data returned by the server in our template.

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

If you refresh the app in the browser, you should now be able to go back and forth between the index page and the public page (either by clicking the links, using the back/forward buttons in your browser, or even modifying the URL in the address bar directly).

Step 4: Adding the protected page

With the public page fully functioning, we will move on to tackling the protected page.

// router.js App . Router . map ( function () { this . route ( 'public' ); this . route ( 'protected' ); });

// routes/protected.js App . ProtectedRoute = Ember . Route . extend ({ model : function () { return API . get ( 'protected' ); } });

{{!-- templates/index.hbs --}} <p> {{ #link - to "public" }} Public Page {{ /link - to }} </p> <p> {{ #link - to "protected" }} Protected Page {{ /link - to }} </p> <p> Admin-only Page </p>

{{!-- templates/protected.hbs --}} <h4> Protected Page </h4> <div id= "content" > {{ content }} </div> <p> {{ #link - to "index" }} Go back {{ /link - to }} </p>

{{!-- templates/error.hbs --}} <h4> An error has occured! </h4> {{ #if message }} <div id= "content" > {{ message }} </div> {{ else }} <div id= "content" > Unknown Error </div> {{ /if }} <p> {{ #link - to "index" }} Go back {{ /link - to }} </p>

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

If you tried clicking on the link to the protected page, you will see that Ember is rendering the error template with the error message returned by the server (“Please login to access this page”). As we haven’t authenticate with the API yet, this is what we would expect. However, how does Ember know to render the error template instead of the protected template?

You might have guessed it – Promises! When the server refuses to process our request, our API client will reject the returned promise. Because Ember’s router is Promise-aware, it will know that a rejected Promise means that something has gone wrong. When this happens, it will abort the original transition (from the index route into the protected route) and transition into the special error route instead.

This in turns causes the error template to be rendered with the rejection reason being the route’s model, which is why we have access to the error’s message from the template.

Step 5: Adding a login page

Since we don’t have the UI to authenticate with the API yet, we still haven’t seen the fully-functional protected page. Let’s add that next!

// router.js App . Router . map ( function () { this . route ( 'login' ); this . route ( 'public' ); this . route ( 'protected' ); });

// routes/login.js App . LoginRoute = Ember . Route . extend ({ actions : { submit : function () { var route = this , controller = this . get ( 'controller' ); var username = controller . get ( 'username' ), password = controller . get ( 'password' ); controller . set ( 'message' , null ); API . login ( username , password ). then ( function ( user ) { route . transitionTo ( 'index' ); }, function ( error ) { controller . set ( 'message' , error . message ); } ); }, cancel : function () { this . transitionTo ( 'index' ); } }, resetController : function ( controller ) { controller . setProperties ({ username : null , password : null , message : null }); } });

{{!-- templates/appliction.hbs --}} <h2> Ember.js Authentication Example </h2> {{ outlet }} <p> {{ #link - to "login" tagName = "button" }} Login {{ /link - to }} </p>

{{!-- templates/login.hbs --}} <h4> Please login </h4> {{ #if message }} <div id= "content" > {{ message }} </div> {{ /if }} <p> <small> To login as a user, use <code> user </code> / <code> secret </code> ; <br> to login as an admin, use <code> admin </code> / <code> secret </code> . </small> </p> <p> Username: {{ in put name = "username" value = username }} </p> <p> Password: {{ in put type = "password" name = "password" value = password }} </p> <p> <button {{ action "submit" }} > Submit </button> <button {{ action "cancel" }} > Cancel </button> </p>

We did quite a lot here, so let’s break it down.

First, we added a login route to the router. Just like you would expect, visiting the /login URL would enter this route and render the login template. Nothing new so far.

In the login template, we added some markup for a simple form, with input fields for the username and password. The value for these input fields are bound to the controller’s username and password properties, which would come in handy later. (For the purpose of understanding this example, you Angular folks might find it helpful to think of the controller as the template’s $scope .)

Below the form, we have two buttons that would trigger the submit and cancel actions, respectively, which will be handled in LoginRoute and invoke the appropriately named functions.

For the submit action, we simply extract the values for the username and password from the controller and pass them to API.login . If the authentication is successful (i.e. the Promise resolves), then we would redirect the user back to the index page; otherwise, we will extract the server’s response and display it in the template.

(If you are curious about the resetController hook we implemented, it simply clears out the values in the login form when transitioning away from the login page.)

Finally, we added a link to the login page. This time, we added the link to the application template (the “layout”), so it will always visible regardless of where you are in the app. We also told Ember to render a <button> tag instead of the default <a> tag, just so we can differentiate it from the rest of the links on the page.

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

With these changes, you can try logging in using the hard-coded credentials (or use something else to see the error messages in action). Once you are logged in, you should be able to view the protected page without problems.

Step 6: Tracking the current user and adding a logout button

If you have played with the demo from the last step, you might find the user experience quite confusing – there are no visual indicatiors to tell the user that the login process was successful. The “Login” button is also always visible on the bottom of the page, even after logging in, making it impossible for the user to infer the state of the system. Ideally, we would like to know if the user is already logged in, and display a “Logout” button instead. We will work on addressing this next:

// initializers/inject-session.js // Register an observable "session" object for tracking current user, etc App . register ( 'service:session' , Ember . Object ); // Make the session object available to all routes and controller App . inject ( 'route' , 'session' , 'service:session' ); App . inject ( 'controller' , 'session' , 'service:session' );

// routes/application.js App . ApplicationRoute = Ember . Route . extend ({ actions : { logout : function () { var route = this ; API . logout (). then ( function () { route . session . set ( 'user' , null ); route . transitionTo ( 'index' ); }); } } });

// routes/login.js App . LoginRoute = Ember . Route . extend ({ actions : { submit : function () { var route = this , controller = this . get ( 'controller' ); var username = controller . get ( 'username' ), password = controller . get ( 'password' ); controller . set ( 'message' , null ); API . login ( username , password ). then ( function ( user ) { route . session . set ( 'user' , user ); route . transitionTo ( 'index' ); }, function ( error ) { controller . set ( 'message' , error . message ); } ); }, // ... }, // ... });

{{!-- templates/appliction.hbs --}} <h2> Ember.js Authentication Example </h2> {{ outlet }} {{ #if session.user }} <p><button {{ action "logout" }} > Logout </button></p> {{ else }} <p> {{ #link - to "login" tagName = "button" }} Login {{ /link - to }} </p> {{ /if }}

{{!-- templates/index.hbs --}} {{ #if session.user }} <h4> You are logged in as {{ session.user.name }} </h4> {{ /if }} <p> {{ #link - to "public" }} Public Page {{ /link - to }} </p> <p> {{ #link - to "protected" }} Protected Page {{ /link - to }} </p> <p> Admin-only Page </p>

First, we introduced the concept of a shared session object and made it available to all controllers and routes in our app. This is where we will keep “transient” states of our app. As these things are only kept in memory for as long as our app is open, this is ideal for tracking the “current user” and similar states. We made it an Ember.Object so that its values can be observed and bound in templates, but otherwise it behaves just like a “plain-old JavaScript object” (i.e. {} ) for our purpose.

We then modified our submit action in the LoginRoute to store the user object returned by the server in the session object upon a successful login.

Because we made the session object available to all controllers, we can now access its content in the templates as well. (For you angular developers, imagine we have added the session object to the root scope.) With that, we modified the application template to conditionally show a “Login” or “Logout” button depending on whether the user has logged in or not. We also added a simple greeting in the index template to remind our users who (the system thinks) they are.

Finally, since the “Logout” button can be clicked from anywhere in our app, we introduced an ApplicationRoute to handle the logout action. Just like templates, routes in Ember can be nested. We won’t get into the details here, but in a nut shell, the ApplicationRoute is always active (just like how the application template is always rendered), making it the ideal place to handle global actions like these. The implementation of the action handler itself is fairly simple – we just call API.logout , set session.user back to null and then transition back to the “index” page.

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

This is one more minor issue – because the “Login” button is rendered in the application template (the “layout”), it will be visible from the login page as well, which made things quite confusing. Fortunately, this is very easy to fix. Since we implemented the “Login” button using the `` helper, Ember will automatically add an active CSS class to the button when the link is active (i.e. we are already on the page that the link is supposed to bring us to). This makes it trivial to hide the “Login” button on the login page with just a few lines of CSS:

/* app.css */ button .active { display : none ; }

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

Step 7: Revisiting the protected page

With our login flow working properly, we can shift our attention back to the protected page. Remember how when you visited the protected page without being logged in, it would just show the error page? Since we know what the user need to do to resolve the problem (by logging in), wouldn’t it be great if we just redirect them straight to the login page? Better yet, it would be fantastic if we remember where the user came from, so that we can redirect them back to the same page upon a successful login. Let’s get to work!

// routes/application.js App . ApplicationRoute = Ember . Route . extend ({ actions : { logout : function () { // ... }, error : function ( error , transition ) { if ( error . status === 'Unauthorized' ) { var loginController = this . controllerFor ( 'login' ); loginController . setProperties ({ message : error . message , transition : transition }); this . transitionTo ( 'login' ); } else { // Allow other error to bubble return true ; } } } });

// routes/login.js App . LoginRoute = Ember . Route . extend ({ actions : { submit : function () { var route = this , controller = this . get ( 'controller' ); var username = controller . get ( 'username' ), password = controller . get ( 'password' ); controller . set ( 'message' , null ); API . login ( username , password ). then ( function ( user ) { var transition = controller . get ( 'transition' ); route . session . set ( 'user' , user ); if ( transition ) { transition . retry (); } else { route . transitionTo ( 'index' ); } }, function ( error ) { controller . set ( 'message' , error . message ); } ); }, // ... }, resetController : function ( controller ) { controller . setProperties ({ username : null , password : null , message : null , transition : null }); } });

// controllers/login.js App . LoginController = Ember . Controller . extend ();

When an error occurs during a route transition (e.g. a Promise was rejected), the Ember router will first invoke the error action handler, offering you a chance to handle that gracefully before transitioning into the error page.

This is exactly what we want to do here. We added a handler for the error action to the top-level ApplicationRoute . From within the handler, we look for a specific type of error (an error with the “Unauthorized” HTTP status returned by the server). If we found what we are looking for, we capture the error message and the current transition so that we can retry it later. Otherwise, we return true to let the action continue to bubble up to the default handler, which would send the user to the error page.

Upon completing a successful login from our LoginRoute , we check if we have a saved transition from earlier (via the error handler we just implemented). If we found one, we will retry the same transition (which should work now that the user is logged in). Otherwise, we transition to the “index” page like we did before.

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

If you are paying close attention, there is a minor hiccup here. So far we haven’t had to define any controllers ourselves. This is because we didn’t need to do much with them, so Ember could just infer what we need and generate them automatically when the route is first entered. However, with our changes to the ApplicationRoute , we would need to access the controller before the login route has been entered.

In this case, Ember won’t be able to infer the type of controller we need (there are different kinds of controllers in Ember), so we will need to explicitly define it. Since we only need the basic functionality, our LoginController will just extend from the Ember.Controller base class.

There is one more improvement we can make to the protected page. Currently, if the user is not logged in, we will still make an API request to the server, just to show an error message on the login page. With the session object, we can now eagerly predict this outcome and avoid that wasteful roundtrip:

// routes/protected.js App . ProtectedRoute = Ember . Route . extend ({ beforeModel : function () { if ( ! this . session . get ( 'user' )) { return Ember . RSVP . reject ({ status : 'Unauthorized' , message : 'Please login to access this page' }); } }, model : function () { return API . get ( "protected" ); } });

All we need to do here is to check if we have a session.user . If not, we can immediately return a rejected Promise just like the API would. That way, our existing error handler would Just Work™ without any changes.

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

Step 8: Adding the admin-only page

Our last task is to add the super-secret, admin-only page.

// router.js Router . map ( function () { this . route ( 'login' ); this . route ( 'public' ); this . route ( 'protected' ); this . route ( 'secret' ); });

// routes/secret.js App . SecretRoute = Ember . Route . extend ({ beforeModel : function () { if ( ! this . session . get ( 'user' )) { return Ember . RSVP . reject ({ status : 'Unauthorized' , message : 'Please login to access this page' }); } else if ( this . session . get ( 'user.role' ) !== 'admin' ) { return Ember . RSVP . reject ({ status : 'Forbidden' , message : 'You are not allowed to access this page' }); } }, model : function () { return API . get ( 'secret' ); } });

{{!-- templates/index.hbs --}} {{ #if session.user }} <h4> You are logged in as {{ session.user.name }} </h4> {{ /if }} <p> {{ #link - to "public" }} Public Page {{ /link - to }} </p> <p> {{ #link - to "protected" }} Protected Page {{ /link - to }} </p> <p> {{ #link - to "secret" }} Admin-only Page {{ /link - to }} </p>

{{!-- templates/secret.hbs --}} <h4> Admin-only Page </h4> <div id= "content" > {{ content }} </div> <p> {{ #link - to "index" }} Go back {{ /link - to }} </p>

As you can see, this was quite easy to do; we didn’t really introduce any new concepts here. We defined a route and the corresponding template, then updated our index to link to it.

Just like the ProtectedRoute , we took advantage of our domain knowledge (this page is only for admin users) and duplicated the access control checks on the client, which allowed us to quickly respond without involving the server. This is an entirely an optional optimization of course – everything would still work the same way if we removed that check, just a little bit slower.

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

Step 9: Handling expired sessions

There is one more missing piece before we wrap up – I promised that we will handled expired sessions, so I guess we still need to implement that. But what if I tell you we already did? ;)

Upon encountering an expired session token, our well-mannered sever is going to respond with a “401 Unauthorized” error. This happens to be the same error it sends when the user didn’t login at all (if you think about it, they are really the same thing as far as the server is concerned). This is great, because our app already knows how to handle it – by redirecting the user to the login page – which is also exactly what we want here.

To see it in action, we will add a button to simulate this scenario:

// routes/application.js App . ApplicationRoute = Ember . Route . extend ({ actions : { // ... expireSession : function () { API . token = 'expired' ; }, // ... }, // ... });

{{!-- templates/application.hbs --}} <h2> Ember.js Authentication Example </h2> {{ outlet }} {{ #if session.user }} <p><button {{ action "logout" }} > Logout </button></p> <p><button {{ action "expireSession" }} > Force session expiration </button></p> {{ else }} <p> {{ #link - to "login" tagName = "button" }} Login {{ /link - to }} </p> {{ /if }}

We are simulating the expiration of a session by changing our session token to expired , and our mock server will take care of the rest.

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

We have now introduced a scenario where a user can end up on the login page even when session.user isn’t null . If the user clicks “Cancel”, they will be redirected to the index page and the app will still behave as if they are logged in (showing the “Logout” button, etc). This does not pose any security risk (because the server will keep refusing to serve any content and the user will just keep hitting the login page), but it would nevertheless make some pretty confusing user experience.

To address this, we will make sure we clear the authentication information when the login route is entered:

// routes/login.js App . LoginRoute = Ember . Route . extend ({ // ... beforeModel : function () { API . token = null ; this . session . set ( 'user' , null ); }, // ... });

With that, our job is finally done!

Try it out on JS Bin

View the diff on Github

Wrapping up

It’s time to take a deep breath and relax a little bit. We have come a long way, and you have learned a lot.

It might seem like a lot of code, but it was actually less than 100 lines of JavaScript if we exclude the API and comments. In terms of features though, we definitely did a lot – we wrote a multi “page” JavaScript app that works with a remote server, handles authentication/authorization, errors, URLs, browser history and more. We even redirected to the right page after a successful login!

While most front-end JavaScript frameworks/libraries focuses on a nice API for individual widgets (components) on the page (which is important, and arguably the most common use case!), Ember really shines when it comes to tying these small pieces together for building full-fleged applications (Ember does widgets/components too, but that would be another blog post!).

I hope this tutorial gives you a taste of the power of the Promise-based Ember router and how it helps you to build your applications “flow” with minimal effort – we are barely scratching the surface here.

Ember.js Promises to make writing ambitious client-side applications easy. Ambitious is the key here – if you are just looking for a quick widgets libraries or something to help build a mini app, you might find that there are, by comparison, more concepts and patterns to learn. But once you get past the learning… cliff, you can be really productive in Ember! (Be sure to check out how Ember CLI helps you tie these pieces together, too!)

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