cakephp - $this->Auth->user() sometimes returns $user['User']['user']['id'] and other times $user['user']['id']

Question

when using

$user = $this->Auth->user();

to get the details about the currently logged in user, sometimes the returned array is like:

> user 
    > User 
    > Office 
    Message

and other times it's:

> user
    id
    name
    > Office

This is annoying because in my view I output the users name and sometimes it's an extra level down in the array because of the extra ['User'] and sometimes it's not.

How can I control this or understand how I can know which version to expect?

thanks

EDIT here's my login action

public function login() {
    $this->layout = 'loginlayout';
    if ($this->request->is('post')) {
        if ($this->Auth->login()) {
            // did they select the remember me checkbox? - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12447487/cakephp-remember-me-with-auth
            if ($this->request->data['User']['remember_me'] == 1) {
                // remove "remember me checkbox"
                unset($this->request->data['User']['remember_me']);
                // hash the user's password
                $this->request->data['User']['password'] = $this->Auth->password($this->request->data['User']['password']);
                // write the cookie
                $this->Cookie->write('remember_me_cookie', $this->request->data['User'], true, '4 weeks');
            }
            return $this->redirect($this->Auth->redirectUrl());
        } else {
            $this->Session->setFlash(('Username or password is incorrect'));
        }
    }
}

Also In my app controller's before filter I have:

if (!$this->Auth->loggedIn() && $this->Cookie->read('remember_me_cookie')) {
        $cookie = $this->Cookie->read('remember_me_cookie');
        $user = $this->User->find('first', array(
            'conditions' => array(
                'User.email' => $cookie['email'],
                'User.password' => $cookie['password']
            )
        ));
        if ($user && !$this->Auth->login($user)) {
            $this->redirect('/users/logout'); // destroy session & cookie
        }
    }

Is it possible that logging in via the cookie causes this different result?

If you got your login method right, it will only have one single way of data structure in your Auth session (the latter in your examples). Check your controller code for login and post that maybe here. — mark, Nov 28 '13 at 22:06
it seems to be whenever there is this extra 'message' field. If that appears in the result of $this->Auth->user() then it seems to have another level in the array. Even though the message is always empty — crazy sarah, Nov 28 '13 at 22:17

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 28 '13 at 22:27

2

So

$this->Auth->login($user)

is a bad idea if you want your Auth session data to be always in that structure as it is from login() itself. And you already knew that it adds an additional "User" key. So all you needed to do was to debug() the $user data and you would have seen that it needs to be

$this->Auth->login($user['User'])

PS: it is also documented in the cookbook, by the way. And also in the code when you look at the source code.

answered Nov 28 '13 at 22:27

mark

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For reference: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-libraries/components/authentication.html#manually-logging-users-in – mark Nov 28 '13 at 22:36

cakephp - $this->Auth->user() sometimes returns $user['User']['user']['id'] and other times $user['user']['id']

1 Answers1