Achieve Brilliant Authentication of Your AngularJS Application
7 min readThe number of applications is growing every day, and with it, our reliance on these applications is also increasing.
Nowadays, even the simplest of tasks are done through applications, and the most important of them all is the task of transactions.
The increased dependence on the internet has undoubtedly made our lives easier. When we were kids, we always dreamt of eating food right out of the screens; we never knew it would be possible with applications like Uber Eats.
Where you can order whatever you want, whenever you want it, in just a few clicks.
Since we are dependent on applications for even trivial needs like ordering clothes, monetary transactions via these applications via the internet are part of our routine.
With data such as credit card details, address, name, location, everything passed on through the internet from one device to another, authentication has become one of the main objectives to accomplish while developing your application.
The best way to ensure you develop an application with proper authentication, as not to lose a single consumer due to security breach and provide full-fledged security to even the slightest of data of your users is to develop your application using AngularJS.
The most efficient way of ensuring everything goes as per your expectations is to hire Angular JS developers who are skilled in what they do. With their experience and guidance, you will be able to achieve significant heights in authenticating your application.
However, you must still know the basics. As a product owner, you must understand the intricacies of your application’s technology and everything your developer implements.
Let’s start with the basics!
What is Authentication?
Authentication refers to the process of identifying your user’s identity. It is a mechanism through which you can associate an incoming request with a set of identifiable credentials.
The credentials provided by your users are then compared to those stored in a file in the database of the authorized user’s information.
This information is stored on a local operating system or in an authentication server.
The authentication process is always established at the beginning of the application. Before the permission and the check occurs, and before any code is granted permission into the app.
Different systems require different credentials to recognize an authorized user. These credentials are often individual passwords against individual usernames.
There are several ways you can strengthen your application’s authentication in AngularJS.
You can start by looking for angular programmers for hire to begin your work with accurate precision and expertise.
You can also follow the following tips and tricks if you believe it’s achievable by your individual efforts:
Authentication:
Using an angular-powered form, we can use the ngSubmit directive to trigger the scope function on submit. Remember, we pass the “username/password” credentials as an argument rather than relying wholly on $scope.credentials; this makes it easy for you to unit-test your function while avoiding coupling between the scope and the function.
Communicating session changes:
Authentication is one of the most critical aspects of an application; it directly affects the app’s entire state. Therefore, it is better to use events (with $broadcast) while implementing changes in the user session.
It is a useful practice to define each available event code in a central destination.
For this, you may use contestants, their ability to be injected as a service lessens your efforts to mock them in the unit testing. You can also easily rename them as per your timeline, without changing a load of files.
The Authentication & Authorization Service:
The logic related to the access control in the authentication and authorization features functions at the best when grouped in a service.
To separate the concerns regarding authentication, you can use another service to maintain your user’s session information:
service(‘Session’, function () {
this.create = function (sessionId, userId, userRole) {
this.id = sessionId;
this.userId = userId;
this.userRole = userRole;
};
this.destroy = function () {
this.id = null;
this.userId = null;
this.userRole = null;
Once a user logs-in, her/his information is displayed somewhere there. For this, the user object should be referred to in the scope object, somewhere a place that’s accessible to the whole application.
Access Control:
Authorization (access control) in AngularJS is hypothetical. Since we are considering the client-side of an application here, all the source code is in your hands. There is no particular thing preventing the user from tampering with your code to obtain the “access” to specific use and interface elements.
What we can do here is implement “visibility control.” If you need to implement full-on authentication, you will have to carry out the task at the server-side of your application, which is only possible when you Hire Angular Developers.
Server-side authentication can not be explained in one article; it is the task only a skilled, knowledgeable, and experienced developer can perform.
Restricting element visibility:
AngularJS provides your application, the facility of several directives working to hide or show an element based on some expression or scope property like ngHide, ngShow, ngSwitch, and ngIf.
The first two will use the “style” attribute to hide the element, while the last two will delete the component from the DOM.
The first solution suits best only when the expressions are frequently changed, and the elements do not contain a lot of scope references and template logic.
The second solution will delete the entire DOM, including any scope binders or event handlers. Changing the DOM is one hell of a task for any developer; therefore, using ngHide/ngShow in some cases may be a wise thing to do.
Restricting route access:
There might be many instances when you wish to disallow access to all of your pages rather than hiding a particular element.
In such cases, the access can be specified using the custom data object on the route or state (if using UI Router).
The next step is to check the properties every time the route changes (i.e., a user navigating to another page). When a user is unauthorized to access a particular page, the transition from one page to another would be prevented. Therefore, the user will have to stay on the current page.
Session Expiration:
Authentication is always the server-side task. However, when you implement it, your application’s back-end will have to perform the actual verification of user credentials and handle functions like revoking access and session expiration.
This implies your API will sometimes reply with an authentication error.
The standard way of such communication is through HTTP codes.
Commonly used authentication error codes:
- 401 – the user is not logged in (unauthorized)
- 403 – the user has logged-in but denied access (forbidden)
- 419 – session expired (authentication timed out)
- 440 – Session terminated (login timeout for Microsoft only)
Hire AngularJS developers who can handle such authentication errors and fix the glitches as per your requirements. Several codes can be used to avoid such errors that can be best implemented by your developer.
Issues With the Login Form”
Most users rely on password managers to store their credentials for the ease of future logins. Managers mostly have a hard time dealing with AngularJS forms; the two most frequent issues they face are:
- From submission remains undetected; therefore, credentials never get stored.
- Angular fails to pick up automatically filled fields.
These problems can be uprooted. However, it involves a timeout function or an iframe. If you find it too hectic and wish to keep your code clean and non-ugly, you may want to keep the form function completely out of Angular and go for the traditional server-side rendering.
If not, you may use the “improved” form in Angular with your hired developer’s help.
Restoring user state:
A very tricky part of the authentication of any single page application (SPA) is restoring and retaining the information of the already logged in user when a visitor refreshes a page.
Since all the information is on the client-side, refreshing a page may clear out relevant information. To tackle this situation, you can use an API endpoint that returns the user data upon login. This endpoint is at the start of the AngularJS application (in the run function). After this, the user data is saved in the session service, just like after a successful login.
Conclusion:
The options worth exploring are never-ending. It would be best if you aimed to find the right Angular programmers for hire to find out various fresh tips and tricks of your own- ones that fit exactly to your application needs.
Ultimately, everything will boil down to the specifics of your back-end implementation.
Keep in mind, proper security of your application is only dependent on the server-side. Therefore, you can protect your application to a certain extent from the client-side, but you will still have to create a robust authentication system at your application’s server-side to provide complete security to your user’s data.
This task can only be carried out by an experienced professional, skilled, and knowledgeable in the technology and its specifications, aka your developer.
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