Logging in using different user roles in CakePHP?

Question

I am making a system using CakePHP in which the users can be either A, B or C. Like student, teacher and some other role. Is it possible to let them all login via 1 link? so not /students/login and /teachers/login, but something like www.somewebsite/login for all of them?

Answer 1

Read this tutorial, it exactly covers what you're asking for. Also read this section.

It does not make any sense at all to have different controllers for different types of users, you'll just duplicate code. If you need to take different actions based on the role you can do that within your login method by calling another method like afterStudentLogin() from within your login() method and do role specific things there. The reason for that is that a single method should always just do one task, so you decouple the role specific code from it in a separate method.

public function login() {
    if ($this->Auth->user()) {
        /* ... */
        $callback = 'after' . $this->Auth->user('role') . 'Login');
        $this->{$callback}($this->Auth->user());
        /* ... */
    }
}

Even if the user types are very different, they all will share a common thing: The login. In this case have an users table and for example student_profils table and teacher_profiles table. If the difference is just a few fields I would put them all in one table like profiles.

If you want to have /login instead of /users/login you should use routing.

Router::connect(
    '/login',
    array(
        'controller' => 'users',
        'action' => 'login'
    )
);

You can also take a look at this Users plugin which covers a lot of the usual user related tasks. And here is a simple multi-role authorization adapter.

Answer 2

A simple basic login function depending on user group would look like as given below

<?php
public function login() {       

        //if user already logged in call routing function...
        if($this->Session->read('Auth.User')) {
            $this->routing();
        }

        if ($this->request->is('post')) {

            if ($this->Auth->login()) { 

                //if user status is active...
                if ($this->Auth->user('status') == 1){ 

                    //redirect users based on his group id...
                    if($this->Auth->User('group_id')==1){
                        $this->redirect($this->Auth->redirect('/admins/dashboard'));
                    } 
                    else if($this->Auth->User('group_id')==2){
                        $this->redirect($this->Auth->redirect('/teachers/dashboard'));
                    } 
                    else if($this->Auth->User('group_id')==3){
                        $this->redirect($this->Auth->redirect('/students/dashboard'));
                    }
                } 
                else{

                    $this->Session->delete('User');
                    $this->Session->destroy();
                    $this->Session->setFlash('Your account is not yet activated. Please activate your account to login.', 'warning');
                }

            } 
            else {
                $this->Session->setFlash('Your username or password was incorrect.', 'error');
            }
        }
    }

//just route the loggedin users to his proper channel...
public function routing() {

        if($this->Session->read('Auth.User.Group.id') == 1) {
            $this->redirect('/admins/dashboard');
        } 
        else if($this->Session->read('Auth.User.Group.id') == 2) {
            $this->redirect('/teachers/dashboard');
        }
        else if($this->Session->read('Auth.User.Group.id') == 3) {
            $this->redirect('/students/dashboard');
        } 
        else {
            $this->Session->destroy();
            $this->redirect('/');
        }
    }   
?>