How can I communicate between web applications?
I have an application that manages my web application with other applications: When I login to my application, it lets me connect to another application.
I work in VS2015 ASP.net MVC, c#. Help, please!
I am not sure what do you mean here by communication.
it can have two meanings -
Page Re-directions from one web app to another:
You want the links of other applications to be included in one application and then when user clicks they can redirect users to those respective pages. If you have SSO implemented, they will not even ask the login information.
This would be simple, you have to include anchor tags with targets of other web sites.
As long as they are hosted under same domain name, it would work.
If they are not hosted in same domain name, then you will have to enable CORS in those web sites to allow requests from other origins.
Secondly, by communication, you may mean to just call APIs to get some data in current web app
For this you will have to write the RESTful APIs from other applications which cater to your needs.
Then you can call those APIs like any other web API call.
Here also, if the other applications / APIs are not hosted under same domain name, you will have to enable CORS.
For enabling CORS in your application, please refer this MSDN article.
For creating APIs, you can refer this MSDN article.
Again, this is not directly answers to your question. But I am sure this has provided enough details to think about integrating with other apps.
Hope this helps.
Related
I'm trying to find a full tutorial on creating your own extent authentication service. Similar to the ones you see that say "Login with Google" or Facebook or Twitter... How do I create my own version of those? Including allowing creation of "apps", creating their app key and secret.
Maybe I'm searching for the wrong terms when looking, I'm not sure.
Ive have a need for a central login service where applications will be able to login a user and receive their information if they have sufficient permissions.
I'm using c# and web api 2 if this helps.
Thanks
IdentityServer (3 or 4 depending on your .Net preference) would be a good place to start. It is an open source project that supports the OAuth2 / Open ID protocols and is very well documented to show you where to plug in your app into the pipeline. https://identityserver4.readthedocs.io/en/release/index.html
I have made a new project using the ASP.NET Web Application template in Visual Studio 2015. Then I selected MVC and Individual User Accounts to specify the template further. The solution I got is complete in that it offers me all the web pages you need for account management such as registering and logging in.
However, now I want to hook in a Xamarin.Forms mobile client to this account management scheme. I am making a native UI to register users, instead of redirecting them to a webpage or webview. I want to send user registration data, such as username and password, from this UI to the server so it will create an account. This means that I don't want to use the webpages offered by my MVC app, but rather send the registration data to the server and have it create an account, notfifying me of succes or failure.
I am anticipating that I would need to either use HTTP POSTs to login and registration endpoints in the AccountController or implement a public API. However, doing a post will return a webpage, and my client is not interested in a webpage.
I think one of the above should be possible to implement quite easily, but I am having a hard time searching for answers or methods, since I don't know how to phrase my problem properly, and with the abundance of guides on MVC, all my results are muddied.
Is my idea of this being possible flawed or have I missed a fundamental concept of MVC? What are the steps I should take in order to make this possible?
One misconception is that doing a POST will return a webpage. You can return any type of content from an MVC controller. But your account registration endpoints should be Web API controllers that return JSON. That JSON can be as simple as containing a boolean that indicates if the action was successful or not.
You do not need to use MVC at all. You can completely do away with the account controllers and views that the template created for you. Just copy the code that you need from the MVC controllers into your Web API methods.
You're right, this is quite easy to do.
I think, You can use ASP.NET Web API for doing this task. On server, you host your API for registering the users as well as logging into some client application.
Now, You need to consume this API in a client application. The client application could be a Console application, Windows application or a Web application. There are lots of tutorials about making an Web API on official ASP.NET site.
I am building a set of services based on MVC 4. They should all be a part of the same authentication system. Currently I have got a separate project for all the model handling, including the Forms Authentication you get by default when making a new MVC 4 app.
Now, I would like to make a toolbar for logging in to our cloud services, and this toolbar must be made in such a way that it can be imported into our other services. Logging in with this toolbar should log you in to all our services, that are separated into different MVC apps. Thus logging in when browsing "service1" and then going to "service2", you should still be logged in with the same user.
Can anyone point me in the right direction here? Should I make a separate MVC app for this toolbar, and somehow reference it in all of my other projects? Should I export my controllers into a separate project and use them? I am not sure what the best practice is here, nor where to find the info I need on the matter.
Since you will be hosting your applications on different domains, you could implement some Single Sign On mechanism the way SO does it over the Stack Exchange network: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/64260/how-does-sos-new-auto-login-feature-work/64274#64274
Different domains means that you won't be able to share the Forms cookie. You should rather learn how to use one of the enterprise Single Sign-on protocols - using a recognized protocol means that you can easily integrate other applications, even if they are developed in different technologies (standarized protocols are supported by most development environments).
Possible candidates are:
the OAuth2 protocol. It is a respected protocol as Google, LiveID, Facebook, Twitter and others support it. To build an OAuth2 server you will need a framework like the DotNetOpenAuth.
WS-Federation. Got a lot of attention in .NET world as we got the Windows Identity Foundation framework which lets you create WS-Federation servers and clients.
Anyway, my advice is to invest your time now as this will pay off well in future.
Ultimately I want to create a desktop app that allows users to update their own status, view status' of their friends, update pics etc. - basically a lot of the functionality the facebook website provides. Through looking through some tutorials and sample projects it seems that an app must be created for the facebook account. Now is this the facebook account of the developer (i.e. mine) - which will provide an API key that will allow any other user to log in?? Does every desktop project need to authenticate the user through a facebook dialog window to take the users' credentials?? Where does OAuth fit into this?? If anyone can shed any light as to the structure of the facebook api and the ways in which I can grant this functionality from say a WPF C# app for example I would really appreciate it.
EDIT: Before complaints of a potentially huge question or too 'vague', my question is specific to the integration/use of the facebook API in desktop applications - not how to then retrieve status feeds etc. I'll work that out myself.
Per Facebook documentation, all desktop apps will need to implement some form of web browser integration, whether embedded within the desktop app or controlled.
See: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
Desktop Apps
Our OAuth 2.0 implementation does not include explicit desktop app
support. However, if your desktop app can embed a web browser (most
desktop frameworks such as .NET, AIR and Cocoa support embedding
browsers), you can use the client-side flow with one modification: a
specific redirect_uri. Rather than requiring desktop apps to host a
web server and populate the Site URL in the Developer App, we provide
a specific URL you can use with desktop apps:
https://www.facebook.com/connect/login_success.html.
Don't worry it took me two solid days of trial and error and re-re-reading of the documentation on authentication to finally "get" it.
I want my web app (running in a browser) to, at some point, communicate (bidirectionally) with a desktop app (in Windows), the client has installed in its computer.
What's an elegant and modular and simple way of doing this (with Java and C#)?
Not much information will be passed between the web app and the desktop app. Just something like "I was here", "Pick this from this point", etc.
I solved that problem by using a database on the network.
All communications where made trough the database.
Website -> DB -> User logged in <- DB <- Desktop
However, if no trusted information needs to be shared, you could consider just posting and reading some http headers to a common website, or a simple log file.
Greetings
I suggest you to use the backend part of your webapp, assuming that your app is based on some backend services.
You have two options:
Your desktop apps use the same services of your web app. You must use a class that mimic a web-browser to give the data (curl, ie). If your web app is based on AJAX push ( APE Server i.e ) use library that is able to run some javascript
Use a REST protocol, with a JSON format in your backend services. It's easy to manage and is supported by many client-side languages (java/c#/python....)
Use a specialized endpoint only for your desktop app,for C#, you can use WCF, that allow you, in one of his forms bidirectional communications. For JAVA, there are WSDL, DWR
My preferred solution is to decouple the web app in a front-end side and a backend side, that expose the services as REST that are used by the web app via AJAX.
If I need true bidirectional communication with other desktop app, I'll create a separate service / endpoint for it. (APE , WCF, ..)
I see several options to achieve part of what you are asking:
Besically you expose the relevant parts of your apps (web and desktop) via some sort of API and use that for the communication - for example DB and/or WCF (SOAP/REST/whatever).
BEWARE:
If you are after some sort of direct/interactive communication between both apps on the same computer then this won't be possible - at least not without some security related issues.
The browser executes your web app in a sandbox which doesn't allow for direct communication between the web app and the desktop... there are technologies which can help circumvent that (ActiveX, signed Java applets, some Flash technology called AIR etc.)... or you could host some webbrowser/control in your desktop app which in turn runs the web app... BUT basically I would recommend against using any such measures...
IF you really want to go this route then please describe your environment and goal with much more detail.