[DISCUSSION] feat: allow server-side modification of user doc on account creation

[janl]

Heya, I’m using this outside of Hoodie and I found the need to be able to change the user doc on account creation.

E.g. I need to add another role to the user doc, and the server will know which one.

My idea was to add a function, for illustration purposes called userDocModificationFun (please bikeshed), to pass into the plugin options, and then, if that function exists, it gets called on account.add(). In order to support this, the top level options object needs to be passed down to account.add() (which looks like was planned anyway, this adds the plumbing).

Please let me know if this is an acceptable addition. If yes, I’m happy to add tests and clean things up.

[gr2m]

When you use hoodie-account-server outside Hoodie, can you explain why you can’t modify what you pass to server.plugins.account.api.account.add(options) directly?

[janl]

@gr2m I’m using the hoodie-account-client as well.

[janl]

I could pass these things in from before hoodie-account-client, but I can’t trust the client about these things.

[gr2m]

Ah, what you need is a hook like pre:add where you can alter the account object before it gets stored to the users database? We have something similar for the client API: https://github.com/hoodiehq/hoodie-client/blob/issue/3/lib/init.js#L6-L10 It's currently undocumented because we are not 100% happy with the API, we could do something similar for the server side, too.

One idea would be to see how hapi is doing it with their request lifecycle. We also had a discussion about a hook dream API here: hoodiehq/hoodie-client#42, which might work for your use case as well.

tl;dr;

• the topic is relevant
• we don’t have a simple solution
• we can add an undocumented API for the time being so you can move forward

[gr2m]

just an idea for a workaround, you could maybe use https://github.com/pouchdb/pouchdb-wrappers to wrap the PouchDB instance that you pass to hoodie-account-server?

[janl]

I like the idea of hooks and other things, but I’ve now realised, that the information I’m storing is only available at request-time (e.g. request.headers.host), so I need to figure out how to be able to access that, or pass that down. Will reopen, when I’ve got something.

[janl]

well that’s embarrassing 😳 here’s a version that does that :D, so my stuff can be made to work (squashed and force pushed)

[janl]

we’d make this a util of course

[janl]

The doc I want to augment is created in api/account/add.js, so running the hook before that doesn’t really work. Although I like the idea of such a design. Maybe we can pass a prototype doc into addAccount() that gets merged with the default defined in there?

[gr2m]

We had a discussion on this and will see if we can use the custom "signup" route handler for this. This feature is not yet implemented. The idea is that besides custom requests that can be passed as on object to the @hoodie/acocunt-server hapi plugin, you can also pass in account routes for signup, signin, signout and destroy, which would then overwrite the default route handlers from routes/account.js. It will mean some code duplication, but I see this as a power user tool, and the benefit would be minimal added complexity to @hoodie/acocunt-server as it is today

[gr2m]

@janl we now use before-after-hook at several places in Hoodie. I think that could fit perfectly with your initial requirement

Heya, I’m using this outside of Hoodie and I found the need to be able to change the user doc on account creation.

E.g. I need to add another role to the user doc, and the server will know which one.

We could for example expose an add hook, which would wrap this db.put(doc) call so that you could do something like this

server.plugins.account.api.hook.before('add', function (properties) {
  properties.roles.push('mycustomrole')
})

server.plugins.account.api is exposed by the @hoodie/account-server hapi plugin, so you can call it after registration is done. We could also add a hooks option to the plugin itself, it could work like this:

server.register({
  register: hapiAccount,
  options: {
    // other options
    hooks: {
      add: {
        before: function (properties) { properties.roles.push('mycustomrole') }
      }
    }
  }
}, function (error) {
  if (error) {
    throw error
  }

  // plugin account api, see below
});

Would that be helpful for your use case?