How to achieve "Remember Me" functionality for both local and remote login pages?

Question

I have a requirement in my application for iOS and Android, developed using IBM Worklight, to remember the user ID if the user selected this option.

I can achieve this by using localStorage, but the issue is that I have two login pages:

• One is placed within the application, and the
• Second is hosted on a remote server

Depending on the conditions the application will meet, either the remote login page will be displayed or the local login page will be displayed.

If I use localStorage on local page it is not accessible for server side login page. So I want to use some storage/file on the mobile to store my user id which is accessible for both local and server login page. Is this is possible using worklight/phonegap storage?

More explanation:

Remote login page is hosted on some www.xxx.com domain. My requirement is on launch of application the local login page is shown to the user, there user can enter user id and password and selects remember me option and submits form. Then user logs in and navigated to some xxx.com/yyy server page. From there when user clicks on log out it navigates to remote login page which is hosted on www.xxx.com server. As user already checked remember me option in local page the remote login page has to pre populate the user id text box. And same scenario should happen when user enters credentials in remote login page and selects remember me check box. So when user kills the application from background and relaunches the application user will get local login page where I need to pre populate the user id last time he entered.

Answer 1

Short answer: in my opinion, no.

Longer answer: I will explain what I think using your scenario:

Remote login page is hosted on some www.xxx.com domain. My requirement is on launch of application the local login page is shown to the user, there user can enter user id and password and selects remember me option and submits form.

So far so good. You can store it in either Web Storage or JSONStore or use Cordova File API. Catch: all of these are available ONLY for the specific application.

Then user logs in and navigated to some xxx.com/yyy server page. From there when user clicks on log out it navigates to remote login page which is hosted on www.xxx.com server. As user already checked remember me option in local page the remote login page has to pre populate the user id text box.

Still plausible. Lets say the user selected 'Remember Me', so you can adjust the URL pointing to the remote login page and send with it as parameters the username and password. Assuming that there will a mechanism to handle those on the remote page.

This does not come for free, though.

• This is not meant to work out-of-the-box. It's worth noting that whether Web Storage (localStorage...) is used or any other type of storage- the application and the Cordova InAppBrowser do not share the same localStorage, and the same is true if you open a new WebView.

And same scenario should happen when user enters credentials in remote login page and selects remember me check box. So when user kills the application from background and relaunches the application user will get local login page where I need to pre populate the user id last time he entered.

This is also a problem IMO, because any application is sandboxed - be it the browser app or the Worklight app, each of them is sandboxed. so you can't just go to website X, and create some localStorage for it and expect that data to be available for another WebView belonging to another app. That's the whole point of sandboxing, in order to protect the app.

And in this case, where the remote "page" will save the data, only Web Storage is available anyway, as JSONStore requires the Worklight API, which is not available when you load external websites.

Notes:

• Since you want to save both username and password, you'd probably want to encrypt them in some way, so JSONStore and WL.EncryptedCache are your options, rather than plain Web Storage.