Take user back to previous page after logging in (Node) - angularjs

Question

I want to be able to redirect unauthenticated users from an individual post's page to the login and then back to the post after the user has logged in.
My login route is like this:
router.get('/login', function(req, res, next){
if (req.user){
res.redirect('/wall');
} else {
res.render('login');
}
});
My wall router looks like this:
router.get('/wall', function(req, res, next){
res.render('wall');
});
The post URL will be something like:
http://thisisnotarealdomain.com/wall#/post/ID
My stack is: NodeJS and Angular for the SPA
How do I do that?
Thanks,

Answer 1

First of all, I would create a middleware function to handle the redirection in case the user is not logged in, something like this:
const checkLogin = (req, res, next) => {
// Checks if the user is logged in
if(!userIsLoggedIn) {
// If user is not logged in
// Get relative path of current url
const url = req.originalUrl;
// And redirect to login page, passing
// the url as a query string that Angular
// can access later
res.redirect(`/login/?redirect=${url}`);
} else {
// If user is logged in
// go on and render the page
next();
}
}
router.get('/wall', checkLogin, function(req, res, next){
res.render('wall');
});
This way, if the user is not logged in, you would get redirect to an url like
/login/?redirect=/wall/post/14.
Then in your Angular code, you would wait for the login promise from Node and simply do a redirect to that query string we have: redirect. Something like this:
// Assuming you're logging from a service
angular
.service('LoginService', function($location, $window) {
// Generic login (could be $http, $resource, restangular)
LOGIN_PROMISE
.then(function(res) {
// If login was successful
if(res.success) {
// $location.search() allows you
// to access query strings
var redirectTo = $location.search().redirect;
// And then redirect to the page the
// user were before being redirected
// to the login page
$window.location.href = redirectTo;
}
})
})
Or you could do a redirect directly from your backend code:
// On your Angular code
$http({
method: 'GET',
params: {
redirect: $location.search().redirect
}
});
// On Node
router.get('/api/login', (req, res, next) => {
if(passwordIsCorrect) {
// And do the redirect
res.redirect(req.body.redirect);
}
});
This is just one of a lot of ways you can achieve this (that's the beauty of web development).
Hope this may help you!