New beta user service

ionic-v1
1

According to the beta migration doc http://docs.ionic.io/docs/migration-guide:

"Ionic.User now requires the implementation of Ionic.Auth into your application."

Why has this been introduced? We have an angular app which uses a custom oauth implementation using cordova’s inappbrowser. As such we do not have an email or password to associate to the current user. In the previous version I could arbitrarily create new users based on our unique ID for that user. Is there no supported way for this in the new service?

I can see that you have added the ability to create “custom authentication” http://docs.ionic.io/docs/custom-authentication but this requires a new backend to be written which supports json web tokens https://github.com/driftyco/custom-auth-examples/tree/master/express. We have an existing oauth server which serves this purpose fine.

Is this an oversight in development of the new service? Were you unfamiliar with this use case previously? I hope that there is a way around this that i’ve missed but i fear the ionic user service in it’s current form is not suitable for us.

Regards,
Dom

2

New “Custom Authentication” providers require the inappbrowser cordova plugin (http://docs.ionic.io/docs/custom-authentication).

Without this plugin, making a call to Ionic.Auth.login results in an error:

Ionic.Auth.login('custom').then(undefined, function (err) { console.log(err) })
> Missing InAppBrowser plugin

As far as i know, the inappbrowser plugin is only defined when the app is run on an actual device, and never from within a desktop browser. So the new user custom auth can never be used from within a desktop browser? InAppBrowser overwrites window.open so should in theory still be workable in that environment? I’ve successfully implemented an oauth login flow using window.open as an alternative.