Issue with Worklight authentication on Android and isUserAuthenticated - ibm-mobilefirst

Question

I am experiencing a problem with authentication within an Android application, I am using Worklight version 5.0.6.
I have created a secure app using this authentication configuration:
<securityTests>
<mobileSecurityTest name="Sencha22-Mobile-SecurityTest">
<testDeviceId provisioningType="none"/>
<testUser realm="SampleAppRealm"/>
</mobileSecurityTest>
</securityTests>
<realms>
<realm loginModule="StrongDummy" name="SampleAppRealm">
<className>com.worklight.core.auth.ext.FormBasedAuthenticator</className>
</realm>
</realms>
<loginModules>
<loginModule name="StrongDummy">
<className>com.worklight.core.auth.ext.NonValidatingLoginModule</className>
</loginModule>
</loginModules>
I also have a ChallengeHandler with the following:
challengeHandler.submitLoginFormCallback = function(response) {
var isLoginFormResponse = challengeHandler.isCustomResponse(response);
if(isLoginFormResponse){
//login unsuccessful
Ext.Msg.alert('Error', "Login not successful", Ext.emptyFn);
}else{
//login successful, reload the app
WL.Client.reloadApp();
}
}
The WL.Client.reloadApp() statement is executing correctly after authentication occurs, however the function:
WL.Client.isUserAuthenticated("SampleAppRealm")
is ALWAYS returning NULL on Android.
The application works fine when viewed as Common Resources in Chrome.
Is there a problem with isUserAuthenticated on Android?

Answer 1

First of all, I don't think reloading application after authentication is a good idea.
Now. Authentication information is received from WL server once application connects to it. To connect to a WL server you need to either set connectOnStartup:true in initOptions.js or use WL.Client.connect() API. Since you're saying that problem occurs only on android my guess is that you have timing issue. Make sure that you're calling isUserAuthenticated API after client has successfully received a response from server.

Answer 2

isUserAuthenticated will always return true or false in 5.0.6 and is completely javascript based (so it should be consistent regardless of platform). I think something else is going on here to get you a NULL... are there any javascript exceptions? One way to check is to use a javascript debugging library on android devices such as weinre (add a javascript file to your html, then connect to a local server to debug console output: http://people.apache.org/~pmuellr/weinre/docs/latest/). See if there are any exceptions being thrown in the javascript output. As Anton said, you may also be experiencing a timing issue with your device.
Side note: Anton is correct: WL.Client.reloadApp() may clear the authentication state based on the device or browser's settings.