Access control checks on Controller#beforeAction about chaplin

[eugenet8k]

We are having the same challenge at the moment. Have you ever found an elegant solution for this problem? The ideal way is to return bool value in beforeAction() that would instruct the controller to halt normal flow.

[molily]

In order to cancel the normal flow, we need to know that a redirect happened in the before action. The preferred way of initiating a redirect is the Controller#redirectTo method (see http://docs.chaplinjs.org/chaplin.controller.html). It sets a redirected = true flag on the controller:

https://github.com/chaplinjs/chaplin/blob/master/src/chaplin/controllers/controller.coffee#L52-L55

We’re checking for the redirected flag in the Dispatcher:

https://github.com/chaplinjs/chaplin/blob/master/src/chaplin/dispatcher.coffee#L133

In your cases you’re not using Controller#redirectTo, but the redirect is triggered somewhere else. this is totally fine, but the redirected flag is not set. As far as I can see, you can set this flag manually in your before action. This should stop the normal action from being called.

beforeAction: ->
  unless loggedIn()
    @redirected = true
    mediator.publish('event that eventually triggers a redirect')

[eugenet8k]

Thanks @molily, this helps. It seems my problem was in using Chaplin utility utils.redirectTo() method in beforeAction() instead of Controller.redirectTo() that sets redirected flag.