Question

I’m working with a server-based authentication, so I’m attempting to implement a custom login system in Yii. To learn the system, I tried to create a dummy authentication class that would automatically log in a user. I included the class in the config, but I can’t figure out how to log users in.

Is there a way to automatically log in on the first use of the application (eg as a session is created?) Or is there some better way of achieving this?

The base of this is a custom authentication class:

class MyAuthentication 
    extends CApplicationComponent
    implements IUserIdentity {

    private $_username = '';
    private $_authenticated = False;
    ...
    public function authenticate()
    {
        $this->_username = 'exampleUser'; 
        $this->_authenticated = True; 
        return True;
    }

    public function getIsAuthenticated()
    {
        return $this->_authenticated;
    }

Answer 1

Since my authentication was based on a server-side variable, I was able to use the expression feature of the accessRules array to check if that variable was true. I wrote a custom class to help:

class User
{

  public function is_authenticated() 
  {
    return True;
  }

}

And updated my rules to use an expression check instead of a user check, as described by the documentation:

public function accessRules()
{
    return array(
        array('allow',
            'actions'=>array('index','view', 'new'),
            'expression'=>'User::is_authenticated()',
            ...