Accessing sessions, passport about socketcluster

[jondubois]

Not sure if that's any use but anyway: Regarding your question on mongo's req.user-object object:
You can access the socket's HTTP handshake request object using socket.request... So if you're using express with HTTP middleware which adds the user-object, in theory you should be able to access it using socket.request['user-object']. I haven't tested this, but I'm confident it would work.

Nonetheless, I think using the default SC session store may be easier because it handles distribution across multiple store processes for you and it integrates nicely with SC.

You don't need to add any middleware to express in order to use SC's session store - It's there by default. You can access it through either the socket or HTTP req object (socket.session or req.session).

The session object is effectively an nData client (https://github.com/TopCloud/ndata) which is scoped to a particular session ID. You can use all he methods exposed by the nData client (except the ones related to pub/sub - See link above for API).

So in your example where you use passport.authenticate(), if you have a reference to either a socket object or a HTTP req object, you can just use something like:

req.session.set('user', req.user, function (err) {
  // This is an optional callback to check if data was set successfully on local nData store process
});

Then later, if you need to get the data out of this session:

req.session.get('user', function (err, data) {
  // ... If data is undefined then you know that the request's current session was never authenticated
});

Hopefully that answers your questions. Don't hesitate to ask more questions if you run into any issue. Also suggestions are welcome.

If anyone is interested; The clustering engine (which provides the session object) is a modular component of SC (can be swapped out), the default one (and currently the only one) is called IOCluster: https://github.com/TopCloud/iocluster. Ideally, it would be nice to make alternatives with different popular storage engines like Redis and Mongo.

[mafrost]

Oh how did I not see that! Thank you so much. Both of the solutions worked fine but as you said, the latter one (ndata) works just as good and I don't need to use mongo for sessions!

Thanks again, fast response and good explanations!