Question

I’m trying to build a mobile application with PhoneGap, jQuery Mobile and Backbone.js on the client-side – with a Rails 3 JSON API running server-side.

I know how to fetch the token from the server after being authenticated, but I don’t know how to append the “token_auth” key/value to all the AJAX-requests Backbone.js will make to my server.

Here’s my flow at the moment:

1. User types in some form fields and hits “Log in”
2. Backbone creates a new Player object with the email and password info.
3. I run a Player.authenticate that sets the token to AUTHENTICATION_TOKEN
4. All requests after this should append “auth_token=” + AUTHENTICATION_TOKEN

I’ve looked at http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Sync for maybe overriding the AJAX calls – but that seems quite extreme for this simple task.

Does anyone have any experience with running Devise token_authentication and Backbone.js?

Answer 1

Why don’t append it to all of your jquery ajax requests. It will add the auth_token to all of your ajax calls over jQuery. That might be useful when working directly with jQuery ajax (or libs that do so). But this might be a security issue as well (when you have ajax calls to other sites…).

// this is untested
$.ajaxSetup({ beforeSend : function(xhr, settings){ 

  // just because the auth_token is a private information
  if(!settings.crossDomain) {

    // parse data object
    var dataobj = JSON.parse(xhr.data);

    // add authentication token to the data object
    dataobj.auth_token = AUTHENTICATION_TOKEN;

    // save the dataobject into the jqXHR object
    xhr.data = JSON.stringify(dataobj); 

  }
}});

---

Another approach may be to write that token into the header and process it on the server side:

// thats not beautiful
$.ajaxSetup({ headers : { "auth_token" : AUTHENTICATION_TOKEN } });