Generating Tokens (PHP Friendly Version)

Inside your 'modules' folder, there's a module named 'trongate_tokens'.  This module contains a controller file with a PHP class named, 'Trongate_tokens'.  This class can be used to generate security tokens.

To generate security tokens, we'll be calling upon the _generate_token() method, which is inside Trongate_tokens.php.  Below is a screenshot, showing the _generate_token() method ...and just look at all those beautiful comments!

showing the _generate_token() method

Even without understanding precisely how this method works, you can clearly see - from the comments - than an array must be passed into this method in order for it to work.  You can also see, from looking at the very end of the method, that it finishes by returning a random string.  This string, of course, will be our security token.

This means that usage of the token generation feature will require PHP code that takes the following form:

$this->module('trongate_tokens');
$token = $this->trongate_tokens->_generate_token($data);

In the first line, as shown above, we are loading the trongate_tokens module.  In the second line, we are fetching a token from Trongate by passing in an argument called $data.

What's Expected From The Data Array?

When we invoke _generate_token() we have to also pass in an array of data.  This array may contain up to four properties, three of which are optional.  They are:

• ​user_id (required): an integer, representing the trongate_user_id, for the user who is to receive a token
• expiry_date (optional): a Unix timestamp that represents the token expiry date
• set_cookie (optional): a boolean where true indicates that you'd like PHP to generate a cookie for the user
• code (optional): if you submit a code property with a value of 'aaa', it means that your token will grant full access, regardless of the user's role.  This feature gets used in the API manager but - in practice - it's very unlikely that you'll ever have a need to manually generate a token with a 'aaa' code.

$data['expiry_date'] = time() + (86400*3);

Below is an example of token generation, using the Trongate_tokens class:

$data['user_id'] = 88; //the id from trongate_users
$data['expiry_date'] = time() + (86400*7); //one week
$data['set_cookie'] = true; //requesting cookie generation

//load trongate_tokens module
$this->module('trongate_tokens');

//generate a token
$this->trongate_tokens->_generate_token($data);

$token = $this->trongate_tokens->_generate_token($data);