I'm developing a little app in which users can create their own content. Most content is taken from a MYSQL db and images from AWS S3 and brought to the front through regular jquery/php/html. All content a user has created is private and can only be accessed via a login. However, I would like the users to be able to send selected parts of their content to other users and people via links which they can click on and see that selected content. Much like sending a link to a users image on Facebook to someone outside the community.
I have never done this before and have no idea in how to even begin. If anyone could point me in the correct direction it would be highly appreciated. I have searched around about this but don't really know what to search for.
If this is against SO's rules (as it's a general question about a topic and not specialized enough), please let me know and I'll remove it.
I think the best way to achieve this is to have a private bucket in which each user has distinct permissions on his own folder, and be the only one that can access it. This is something you should probably implement on the application level - allowing only the app to access the bucket, and denying every other type of access.
For the public content - you should create a different bucket which will be publicly available for everyone, and move all public content there.
These are my 2 cents, might be better practices in the field, but IMO it's a nice solution which is not to complicated.
Related
What is the best-supported approach for tracking logged-in Usernames/Ids in App Insights telemetry?
A User with Username "JonTester1" said some Pages he visited 4 hours ago were really slow. How can I see everything JonTester1 did in App Insights to trouble shoot/know which pages he's referring to?
Seems like User Id in App Insights is some Azure-generated anonymized thing like u7gbh that Azure ties to its own idea of the same user (thru cookie?). It doesn't know about our app's usernames at all.
I've also seen a separate field in App Insights called Auth Id (or user_AuthenticatedId in some spots), which looks to sometimes have the actual username e.g. "JonTester1" filled in - but not always... And while I don't see any mention of this field in the docs, it seems promising. How is our app's code/config supposed to be setting that Auth Id to make sure every App Insights log/telemetry has it set?
Relevant MS docs:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/usage-send-user-context
This looks to just copy one library Telemetry object's User Id into another... no mention of our custom, helpful Username/Id anyway... and most in-the-wild examples I see don't actually look like this, including MS docs own examples in the 3rd link below; they instead hardcode get a new TelemetryClient()
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/website-monitoring No mention of consistently tracking a custom Username/Id
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/api-custom-events-metrics#authenticated-users Shows some different helpful pieces, but still no full example. E.g. it says with only the setAuth... JS function call (still no full example of working client-side JS that tracks User) on the page, you don't need any server-side code for it to track custom User Id across both client-side and server-side telemetry sent to Azure... yet then it also shows explicit code to new up a TelemetryClient() server-side to track User Id (in the Global.asax.cs or where?)... so you do need both?
Similar SO questions, but don't connect the dots/show a full solution:
Azure Insights telemetry not showing Auth ID on all transactions
Application Insights - Tracking user and session across schemas
How is Application insight tracking the User_Id?
Display user ID in the metrics of application Insight
I'm hoping this question and answers can get this more ironed out; hopefully do a better job of documentation than the relevant MS docs...
The first link in your question lists the answer. What it does show you is how to write a custom telemetry initializer. Such an initializer lets you add or overwrite properties that will be send along any telemetry that is being send to App Insights.
Once you add it to the configuration, either in code or the config file (see the docs mentioned earlier in the answer) it will do its work without you needing to create special instances of TelemetryClient. That is why this text of you does not make sense to me:
[…] and most in-the-wild examples I see don't actually look like this, including MS docs own examples in the 3rd link below; they instead hardcode get a new TelemetryClient()
You can either overwrite the value of UserId or overwrite AuthenticatedUserId in your initializer. You can modify the code given in the docs like this:
if (requestTelemetry != null && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(requestTelemetry.Context.User.Id) &&
(string.IsNullOrEmpty(telemetry.Context.User.Id) || string.IsNullOrEmpty(telemetry.Context.Session.Id)))
{
// Set the user id on the Application Insights telemetry item.
telemetry.Context.User.AuthenticatedUserId = HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name;
}
You can then see the Auth Id and User Id by going to your AI resource -> Search and click an item. Make sure to press "Show All" first, otherwise the field is not displayed.
Auth Id in the screenshot below is set to the user id from the database in our example:
We access the server from azure functions as well so we set the user id server side as well since there is no client involved in such scenarios.
There is no harm in settting it in both places, javascript and server side via an initializer. That way you cover all scenario's.
You can also manually add user id to app insights by
appInsights.setAuthenticatedUserContext(userId);
See App Insights Authenticated users
I am looking to set up 2 rails apps (with the same tld) which have single sign on and share some user data. If I have railsapp.com I will have the second app set up as otherapp.railsapp.com or railsapp.com/otherapp. I will most likely have railsapp.com handle registration/login etc (open to suggestion if this is not the best solution).
So lets say I sign up and upload an avatar and start accumulating user points on the main-app, I can then browse to the other-app and my profile there has the correct avatar and points total. is there an easy way to achieve this? Do the available SSO solutions create the user in the second app with the same user ID? if not, how are they tied together? (ie how can I query the other app for information I would like to be shared across the 2 - user points and avatar) I was initially looking at sharing a database or at least the user table between the 2 apps, but I can't help thinking there must be an easier solution?
I think the simplest solution is if you set the cookie on the .railsapp.com domain, then it should be sent when you do requests to otherapp.railsapp.com or any other subdomain (just stressing that as it might be a security concern). Remember to mark the cookie as secure!
And a extra bit you might need to make this work, is to store authentication tokens on a database so they can be shared between the two apps.
Disclaimer: I don't have much experience with Rails anymore, so I'm not sure if some of the frameworks like Devise can do something like this out of the box.
Edit
Got curious and ... google had the answer: http://codetheory.in/rails-devise-omniauth-sso/
Problem
I'm trying to provide my users with an alternative to purchasing my iAP by allowing them to share that they're playing the game via facebook.
However, when the composer view controller loads the content is editable by the user. Which, for profitability sake is a bad thing. They could remove the entire message and still receive the perk that they receive for sharing. Thus, ruling out that way of marketing.
I'm curious as to two solutions.
Solution One
Force Read-Only ?
Solution Two
Cancel the sharing and display an error message if the sent message is not equal to the initial text/images.
Also, if it is not possible for them to remove the image and/or url then I don't really have a problem with them adding their own text. However, if they can remove the image/url then there is an issue.
Thank you for reading.
Restricting/enforcing what to share by the user, in any way, is not allowed in the Facebook Platform Policy. See also point 2 of: https://developers.facebook.com/policy#control. You can't make the share dialog read-only and you should not check if they shared the content you have provided.
With the second solution; you might also be hitting a policy restriction. You should not incentivize people to share in order for these kind of promotions. See rule number 5: https://developers.facebook.com/policy#properuse. This might be an more difficult issue though, policy wise.
You can let people share an open graph object; either generated from your app or directly one that you (or FB) is hosting, with an open graph url. For that, see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/opengraph and https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices.
In the Simperium documentation/help section there is the following text:
All the data that is created seems like it must be tied to a user - is
that correct? Is it possible to have data that isn't tied to a user -
say a database of locations or beers?
Yes, though this isn't very clear yet. You can create a public user
(i.e., a public namespace) with an access token you share with other
users of your app so anyone can read/write to that namespace.
It's possible to limit this to read-only access as well if you need to
authoritatively publish data from a backend service.
Is there an actual example with this?
The scenario I have is as follows
My app will have a calendar
The primary user can add and remove data from the calendar
They will want to invite other users to add and remove data, my thought is that they can give them a token, the user can use their email address and this token to sign in
Am I on the right track?
You're definitely on the right track, but a little too far ahead on that track. The scenario you described is a great fit for Simperium, but sharing and collaboration features aren't yet released.
The help text you quoted is for authoritatively pushing content, for example from a custom backend to all users of your app. An example of this would be a news stream that updates on all clients as new content is added.
This is quite different than sharing calendar data among a group of users who have different access permissions, which is actually a better use of Simperium's strengths. We have a solution for this that we've tested internally, but we're using what we've learned to build a better version of it that will be more scalable for production use.
There's no timeline for this yet, but you'll see it announced on your dashboard at simperium.com.
Sorry for the simple question but I've searched through the forums for 2 hours.
Goal:
I want to track my websites URLs across the web. I'm current using google analytical to do tracking which is fine for me. But I want to show my users where their links are being clicked when they login to their account.
What's the best way I can do this? I'm using a php backed if that helps. My goal is to provide: how many times their links are clicked and where the URL was clicked from.
Edit: I was hoping somebody else would give you a better hint, but since the question doesn't seem to attract many people I'll try to give you a better answer.
So, breaking down your problem to pieces, you want to trigger a piece of code everytime a page is accessed. You should be able to do a mapping between the page and its owner at one point - when rendering the statistics. If you want to "cut corners" and have a simple solution, you simply insert into your database a new entry describing the event. You seem to be only interested in the number of times it was accessed, so for a specific pageID, you can count how many entries there is, so this data can be computed directly from your database.
Now, the interesting part, figuring out where the visitor comes from. If you take a look at the $_SERVER variable for PHP, documented here, you will see that it contains a lot of interesting information. I think you're mostly interested in 'HTTP_REFERER' which contains
The address of the page (if any) which referred the user agent to the
current page. This is set by the user agent. Not all user agents will
set this, and some provide the ability to modify HTTP_REFERER as a
feature. In short, it cannot really be trusted.
Looking quickly on Stack Overflow I didn't find a more trustable source, so when available, I guess that's the only data you can use.
If you want to make things a bit more robust, you could log the IP address of the visitor and only count 1 visit per day.
So, to recapitulate, you create a table which logs the visits, containing the pageID and referer (optionally the IP address and date to prevent multiple insertions on the same day from the same user if you want to be strict). You add a function call to each page that will record the information of your pageID, maybe the URL or an ID you use internally? and the value of $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']. Then, when a user wants to see his stats, you look up every pageID that belongs to him, then pull the count of entries for that page and all the referers.
I hope my explanations are clear. It's definitely not bulletproof, but it's simple and should do the job, and it can be programmed pretty quickly.
Old answer: Piwik (documented here) is pretty similar to Google Analytics. Since you own the database where the data is stored, you could probably extract all the data you want, the way you want it, and manipulate it the way you want without having to depend on someone else (Google).