Question

I have two things I need to do in Cake 2.2. I need to check that someone is logged in on every page, and then I need to store their user ID as a constant named UID.

I want to avoid being on each controller and having to check the user. I want it done automatically, so naturally I go to AppController and try BeforeFilter. It doesn’t seem to have initialized the session, so I scratch that and try afterFilter, but that (and BeforeRender) is really not what I want to do; I don’t want a single thing that I can stop from happening, to happen on page request if they’re not logged in. Bootstrapping was also not the answer, as far as I could tell.

So how can I check if a user’s logged in, and at the same time define a constant for the rest of my application?

Answer 1

You can do the same by invoking a user session check method in beforeFilter() method in AppController. Your code should looks like:

<?php
App::uses('Sanitize', 'Utility');
App::uses('Controller', 'Controller');

class AppController extends Controller
{

public $components = array(
'Session',
    'RequestHandler'
);

public $helpers = array('Html', 'Form', 'Session', 'Js' => array('Jquery'), 'Text');
public $uses = array('User');

public function beforeFilter()
{
    if($this->Session->check('User.id'))
    {
        $this->set('logged_in', true);
        $this->set('username', trim($this->Session->read('User.first_name'). ' '. $this->Session->read('User.last_name')));            
    }
    else
    { 
        $this->set('logged_in', false);
    }
}    
/*.......... Rest of your code ..............*/
}

Kindly ask if it not worked for you.