CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

hey,

Is it possible to authenticate a user through the api? I am building an external webapp but I want that users could login with the same credentials as they have provided in civicrm. I want to use the api for this. Basicly what I want is to retrieve some basic contact information based on their username and password, such as their civicrm contact id

Is this possible?

Thanks,
Jaap

This sounds somewhat similar to what CiviMobile needs to do. It's basically implemented as a separate webapp (with mostly JavaScript, HTML, and the Civi API), and it provides its own login form. Of course, it's packaged/distributed as a CiviCRM extension, so it can do some PHP code -- which allows it to cheat and handle authentication by other means. I'm not familiar with all the details of their approach, but this seems to be the relevant code:

https://github.com/webaccess/com.webaccessglobal.module.civimobile/blob/master/code/civimobile.login.html

FWIW, in previous releases, it was possible to submit a username & password to the REST API, get back a PHPSESSID, and then submit the PHPSESSID. However, the feature regressed somewhere in the 4.3.x release process -- which is understandable because it didn't have test-coverage or an active maintainer. (See, e.g., http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,28517.0.html ). If someone wants to reintroduce this feature -- to write a cleaner implementation and unit-tests (along the lines of https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/blob/master/tests/phpunit/WebTest/Utils/RestTest.php ) -- then it would be quite welcome.