Creating The Front Page Data Model

Okay, so I know I need a value called name in my front page data model. How do I get that?

It's stored in the User datastore, so I need to look it up there. In my FrontPage.java, I already look at the session to see if the user is logged in or not. I'd said before we could also look up the User record in the datastore...now's the time we do that.


HttpSession session = req.getSession(false);
boolean loggedIn = false;
String name = "";

if (session != null)
{
loggedIn = true;

// Get the User's name
Long userid = (Long) session.getAttribute ("userid");
PersistenceManager pm = PMF.get().getPersistenceManager();

Query query = pm.newQuery("select from project.server.User where id == idParam");
query.declareParameters("Long idParam");

try
{
List results = (List) query.execute(userid);
User user = results.get(0);
name = user.getName ();
}
finally
{
query.closeAll();
pm.close();
}
}

Map root = new HashMap();
root.put("loggedIn", loggedIn);
root.put("name", name);


Note that we're looking up the User record by id this time. That's the automatically generated id the datastore assigned when we created the User record, and that's what we stored in the session. We can use it to pull the entire User record out whenever we need it.

Now let's update the FreeMarker template to just display this new name, so we know that we've gotten it correctly from RPX. I just changed my current front.ftl like this:


<#if loggedIn>
<a href="/signout">Sign Out, ${name}</a>
<#else>


Unfortunately, when we run this and sign in, we can see that the DisplayName isn't always what we want. For example, if you sign in with a Gmail account, the DisplayName comes up as the user id, not the name.

We could continue working with the RPX results to see what fields might fit what we want, but ultimately those are dependent on the particular OpenID provider. So we'll go ahead and make ourselves independent of those, and create a user profile that we ask all new users to fill out. This will include their name, so we know exactly what they want to be called.

Note that I will still try to populate the user's profile from their RPX results. This is a convenience for the user...if the RPX results provide the right info, they don't have to enter it themselves.