use ion auth authentication for codeigniter in another controller

Question

I am trying to build a web application with codeigniter. I have installed Ion Auth as my authentication model.

The default Auth.php controller authenticates the user and

Answer 1

jcorrys approach should work. An alternative approach (which will give your entire application a great deal more flexibility is to use a modular layout - https://bitbucket.org/wiredesignz/codeigniter-modular-extensions-hmvc

You will have to do a bit of fiddling to get it to play nicely with ion auth, but following the instructions in this question worked for me: Using Ion Auth as a separate module in the HMVC structure (have a look at the forks of ion auth on git hub - I think someone may have already done it for you)

This approach will allow you to access any method in any controller from anywhere in your application (even from a view if you need to) using this kind of syntax: modules::run('module/controller/method', $params);

This will essentially allow you to develop the existing ion auth controller into a user management controller which you can access from any other controllers you create (nice and dry).

Answer 2

obviously the echo $this->session->userdata('username'); does not work as the new controller has no knowledge of the auth controller session.

Eh...if the session library is loaded, then yes...the controller calling it will be able to access the session variable $username.

The way we handle this is to create a new controller parent class like MY_Controller in the application/core directory. This class loads common libraries/packages (like session and ion_auth). You could also autoload the libraries and helpers.

Since ion_auth stores all of the user profile data in a session var, all you need (on subsequent, non-authenticated) pages is the session lib to retrieve session data about the logged in user.

You really should check for their auth status though, and fail gracefully:

if (!$this->ion_auth->logged_in()) {
    // echo a login link
} else {
    // echo session var for username
}

Something like that...

Answer 3

First autoload the ion_auth library. If u simply want to check if the user is logged-in, just check it in every controller's constructor u load

public function __construct() {  
    parent::__construct();

    if (!$this->ion_auth->logged_in()) {
       // redirect to login view
    } 
}

If u happen to have multiple groups , u can create a new controller inside application/core/MY_controller.This controller will check whether user is logged in.You can extend this base controller to create new controller.A very good explanation on this is given by David john.Check this link .