phonegap ajax user authentication with nodejs-expresss-mongo-passportjs

Question

I have already built a basic node.js user authentication system based on node.js, express.js, passport-local.

I store my username and passwords in a mysql database and I use mongo for persistent storage for the sessions. I now want to move the user registration and login to phonegap.

From the tutorials I have found online, the only way that seems work is is AJAX user authentication. However I have two questions:

How do I rewrite the express routes to respond JSON since passport.js relies on redirects?

// process the signup form
app.post('/register', passport.authenticate('local-signup', {
        successRedirect : '/home', 
        failureRedirect : '/register', 
        failureFlash : true // allow flash messages
    }));

// process the login form
app.post('/login', passport.authenticate('local', {
    successRedirect : '/home', 
    failureRedirect : '/login', 
    failureFlash : true // allow flash messages
}));


and in my strategies I have : 

passport.use('local-signup', new LocalStrategy({
        usernameField : 'email',
        passwordField : 'password',
        passReqToCallback : true 
    },
    function(req, email, password, done) {
...
rest of the code that queries the db

also for login

//Configure passport Local Strategy for login
passport.use(new LocalStrategy(
  function(username, password, done) {
  var query = 'select * from users where email = '+  connection.escape(username);
    connection.query(query, function (err, user) {
      if (err) { return done(err); 
... rest of code
}

Will the AJAX authentication in PhoneGap work by sending a post to /login and therefore creating a new active session in the express server?
How do I handle state in the client. In a normal webapp you use redirects for ie. failed login attempts, logout, etc. In an AJAX authentication how do you handle that? Do you return a status code, return new markup, update part of the view?

Alex Alex · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-25T17:24:32

I will close this question as I did some research and my original problem was from my lack of understanding of how phonegap apps are architected. I wasn't aware that I need to follow the single page app architecture vs the traditional web page model.

phonegap ajax user authentication with nodejs-expresss-mongo-passportjs

1 Answers