[Seaside] Making URLs stateful / stateless depending on authentication

[Philippe Marschall]

2010/10/6 Pat Maddox <patmaddox at me.com>:
> I wrote a little blog app, and for visitors to my site I want the blog to use pretty URLs.  When I use the site though, I want to use Seaside callbacks, so I just have to login once and then click around the page.
>
> I have it all working but wanted to see if folks had suggestions for a better way.  Here's my basic structure:
>
> PBApp is my root component.  It has the basic layout, does the updateRoot, and has a child component that points to the main contents of the page.
>
> The other main components are PBBlog - a view of all the blog posts - and PBBlogPost - the model and view for a single blog post.  PBBlogPost renders its title, and that's where the magic happens.  When I'm not logged in, the url should /be-pretty-like-this but when I am logged in, it's Seaside callbacks.  For the callbacks to work, that means telling PBApp (root component) to change the child component it points to.  I wasn't sure of the best way to do that, but going through the Seaside book a bit more I decided to try out the Announcements framework to decouple them.  So my code looks like this:
>
> PBApp>>initialize
>        super initialize.
>        blogRoot := PBBlog new.
>        self session announcer on: PBLinkClicked do: [ :it | blog := it target ]
>
> (the following PBComponent is just a WAComponent subclass that my other components inherit from, to share methods)
>
> PBComponentrenderBlogLinkOn: html with: linkText targeting: aComponent
>        self session isAuthenticated
>                ifTrue: [ html anchor
>                        callback: [ self session announcer announce: (PBLinkClicked targeting: aComponent)  ];
>                        with: linkText ]
>                ifFalse: [ html anchor url: aComponent blogUrl; with: linkText ]
>
> My PBLinkClicked Announcement subclass just carries the component that was targeted.
>
> So you can see what's going on...when we're not authenticated, create a basic HTML <a> tag with the href pointing to a path generated by the component (I have an initialRequest which parses the URL to see if it matches a blog post).  When we are authenticated, use a Seaside callback to announce that this component's link was clicked, which causes the root component to swap it out for viewing.
>
> I'm just looking for some feedback at this point.  What do you guys think?  Is there a more straightforward way to approach this?

Kinda depends why you're doing it. You already have a session, so you
don't gain much. OTOH Google and friends get bookmarkable URLs. Then
again it would probably be nice if you didn't lose them, just because
you logged in.

Cheers
Philippe