Question

I have been working on a site that displays user information on every page. Currently I am retrieving the user details (using an Id stored in the session) and then passing a User object to the render method of each page.

Is there a way to retrieve an object from multiple pages without adding it as a render argument to each method?

Or is this the only/best way to do this?

Answer 1

You can add a @Before method to your controller:

public class UserController extends Controller {
   @Before
   public static void prepareUser() {
      String id = session.get("userId");
      if (null == id) Secure.login();
      User user = User.findById(id);
      if (null == user) Secure.login();
      renderArgs.put("user", user);      
   }
}

Now all other action methods will automatically have a user object in the renderArgs.

If you want to add this capability to other controller class, then in that class you must have @With:

@With(UserController.class)
public class ProfileController extends Controller {...}

You can also use “unless” parameter for @Before annotation to exclude some action methods from the @Before fitler. Check out the Play online documentation about controller interception to find out more details