Authentication & Session Management

Podio Platform supports multiple ways of authenticating a client. The client is considered to be authenticated once it has obtained a valid OAuth2 token. You can easily check if the client is authenticated:

if Podio.isAuthenticated() {
  // The client is authenticated
}

The authentication state is kept by a singleton instance of PKTClient.

Whenver the the authentication state of the client changes, meaning the token is updated, the PKTClientAuthenticationStateDidChangeNotification notification is posted. This can be useful to observe for changing the state of your UI or show a login screen.

Authenticate as a user

This option is great when you want to have every user of your client app to log in using their own Podio account and as such have access to the content of their entire Podio account.

Here is how to authenticate as a user:

let task = Podio.authenticateAsUserWithEmail("myname@mydomain.com", password:"p4$$w0rD")

task.onComplete { (response: PKTResponse?, error: NSError?) in
  if let error == error {
    // Failed to authenticate, double check your credentials
  } else {
    // Successfully authenticated
  }
}

Saving and restoring a session across app launches

If your app is terminated, the shared PKTClient instance will no longer have a token once your app is re-launced. This means that if you want the previous user session to live on, you need to store the authentication token in the Keychain when it changes and restore it from the Keychain when the app is re-launced. Luckily, PodioPlatformKit can take care of that for you!

PodioPlatformKit provides a protocol called PKTTokenStore and a concrete class PKTKeychainTokenStore which stores the token in the iOS or OS X Keychain. All you need to do is add the following line after your call to setupWithAPIKey(_:secret:) in application(_:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:):

Podio.setupWithAPIKey("my-project-api-key", secret: "my-project-secret")
Podio.automaticallyStoreTokenInKeychainForCurrentApp()
// or
Podio.automaticallyStoreTokenInKeychainForServiceWithName("MyApp")

This line takes care of configuring the shared PKTClient instance with an instance of PKTKeychainTokenStore and restores any previous token from the Keychain. If you want to expliticly restore the token, you can call the restoreTokenIfNeeded() method on PKTClient directly. If you are feeling real adventurous you can even implement your own class conforming to PKTTokenStore to store the token anywhere other than the Keychain. You can then set the tokenStore property on the shared PKTClient instance like:

PKTClient.currentClient().tokenStore = MyOwnTokenStore()
PKTClient.currentClient().restoreTokenIfNeeded()

Note that we would not recommend doing this as the Keychain is the most secure container available.