Cross-Activity references using GWT with Gin

Question

I have a GWT MVP application using Activities and Places. This is inspired by Mauro Bertapelle's sample (in this thread), apparently based on some of Thomas Broyer's work.

Here's the problem: I have LoginActivity make an RPC call, which for a successful login, returns a User. This user has a role (e.g., admin, regular user, guest). Several Views and Activities, including a NavigatorView, depend on this role for what they show or do. How do I get this User instance to the other Activities?

I do not have a ClientFactory; injection (Gin) is used for instantiating the Views in the ActivityProviders which provide my Activities/Presenters, and the ActivityProviders are injected into my ActivityMapper. So this may reduce to a Gin question: how do I get the user reference where it's needed? This seems to be similar to this SO question about global references in MVP.

Consider me a Gin newbie, this is my first attempt at using it. I'm guessing there is a "Gin way" to make this happen, but I don't know Gin well enough to know the best way to do this (if Gin should be used at all).

Much thanks.

Edit 1: Despite my best efforts searching SO for a similar question, I just found this question which is pretty much identical to mine (is the SO algorithm for finding "Related" links better than the search?). I'm thinking that the Gin answer by David is on the right track.

I don't think that an EventBus solution is possible. I'm following the Google guidelines which involve instantiating Activity at every Place change, so a single Event by itself will not suffice.

Answer 1

I had similar requirements on a recent project.

When I get a reply from login (or logout) RPC I send a custom AuthenticationEvent on EventBus. All activities that are interested in this listen for this event. AuthenticationEvent has a reference to AppUser object which is null if user just logged out. AppUser contains all necessary data (privileges, groups, etc..) so that activities can inspect it and act upon it.

About global references: you can have a class with static methods providing data that you need. This class internally holds singleton references to needed instances. In my example I have static method AppUtils.getCurrentUser(). Internally it holds a reference to AppUser and also listens to AuthenticationEvent to set/reset this field.

As a side note: don't rely on client side to enforce access restrictions - you should separate your RPC servlets into two groups: public and private. Public can be accessed by anybody (this is basically login/logout RPC and some other public info RPC), while private RPC requires user to be authenticated. Access restrictions can be set per path/servlet: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/config/webxml.html#Security_and_Authentication

Update:

1. As you noted, class with static methods is not advisable in this setup, because it is not replaceable and this prevents testing (which is the whole point of using GIN).

2. The solution is to inject a utility class holding globals (AppUtils) into activities that need the globals. AppUtils should be declared singleton in GIN configuration as one instance is enough for the whole app.

3. To use Provider or not is just a question if you want to delay the initialization of dependencies (AppUtil is dependency). Since AppUtils is a singleton for the whole app it makes no sense to have it lazy initialized.

4. Sometimes you will have a situation where you have multiple Activities shown on screen (in my case it was MenuBar and InfoBar). In this case, when user logs in you will need a way to notify them of the change. Use EventBus.

Answer 2

Something that I'm using on the server-side with Guice, and would work just as well on the client-side, is to bind to a custom Provider. In your case though, you'd have to make the provider a singleton and push the value into it from your RPC callback (rather than pulling it from some context). You'd first need a specific provider:

@Singleton
public class CurrentUserProvider implements Provider<User> {
  private User currentUser;

  public User get() { return currentUser; }
  public void setCurrentValue(User currentUser) {
    this.currentUser = currentUser;
  }
}

You'd bind User to the provider: bind(User.class).toProvider(CurrentUserProvider.class) In your RPC callback you'd inject a CurrentUserProvider so you can setCurrentValue but everywhere else you'd inject Provider<User> to keep CurrentUserProvider as an implementation detail. For very short-lived objects, you could directly inject a User value rather than a Provider<User>.

If you need to notify objects of the value change, you could dispatch an event on the global event bus.

Alternately, you could always use the concrete CurrentUserProvider type (which wouldn't have to implement Provider anymore) and possibly make it a HasValueChangeHandlers so you could register listeners on it rather than on the event bus (but you'd have to clean-up after yourself in your activities' onStop and onCancel to avoid memory leaks, whereas it's taken care of automatically if you register handlers on the event bus in onStart).

(if you ask me, I'd rather go away with authenticating from within the app whenever possible)