Advice on EE + CI + REST
Development and Programming
Howdy, I’m deep into development of a location-based platform based on Codeigniter 2. I have a geodata source in MySQL accessed by the CI app, and accessible via REST.
However, I’d like to couple this with a content management front-end of EE for a variety of reasons. I’m beginning to struggle with a key architectural decision around where to handle authentication. Users will have to login in regardless of the channel, i.e. web or iPhone. So I’m stuck on where to store the authoritative member data and, upon making that decision, how to synchronize across EE and CI apps. I’m now thinking that writing custom SQL to register a member to EE is the best route to go, and to store the keys required to access the REST app from mobile devices in the CI app as originally designed.
I guess I’m looking for some validation of the approach and, if at all possible, some examples of any approaches/code that have been done before in similar situations.
bump?
Bump?
I’d be surprised if EE wasn’t the best source for user data.
There’s a member library and a member model. If you can make your CI app and it’s controllers run in parallel with EE itself, then you should be able to load these up and use them as required. Expect a lot of dependencies though and time spent picking through the source code for usage examples.
Thanks Darren. I am now wondering if I can leverage cURL in my CI app to invoke the member registration action in EE. So, calling http://mysite.com/index.php?ACT=11 via POST and sending the proper data. Seems bulletproof to me in theory, but am hitting a roadblock. I think I might have to be sending something in the headers or something that isn’t documented.
Got it sorted! Will register members through CI app and call the appropriate URL in EE to do the same there as well. Awesome. Wish EE had a full-on REST interface, that would be sweet.