Week 9: Authentication

This week the main task I worked on was implementing full authentication to the API, last week I implemented user permissions in respect to the data the API returns but not full authentication. In order to implement auth I had to learn how the current auth system was setup so that I could integrate it with my own. I went down quite the rabbit hole here in attempt to get my head around it all, I ended up speaking to Chris and he took me over the basics which gave me enough information to continue forward. With the advent of my pursuit into implementation authentication Patrick also pursued the same venture, this involved something similar on his end wherein he had to work with the already existing auth system.

This was quite a learning curve but I managed to get my head around the basics, I might need to pursue further education into this but that's how it goes for developers, learning on the job is the norm.

Auth is assisted by a separate authentication API which both the front-end and back-end system communicate to, this API handles tokens and handles checking of user-specific permissions

At this point Pat had made quite good progress with the frontend, this allowed for the team to give some design related feedback in order to improve the UX/UI design.

Along with the auth I needed to also program the equivalent tests in order to ensure the functionality worked in practice, I made a couple tests in order to account for uses with restricted permissions and a user that is not restricted. If a user has restrictions then the API only returns jobs types that the user has permission to see.

With the completion of auth we are nearing the end of implementing the MVP product we set as our first goal, if we polish this off in time we will be able to move onto added functionality in order to fill in the rest of our time at fieldGo, this would be great as it will allow us to have a more functional page to show at our poster evening.

Now would be a good time to talk about a program I am using often to test my endpoints, Postman is an awesome application that allows you to send API requests and assess with detail the request and response in detail. Would recommend to API developers for sure.