Category Archives: Angular.io

How to use Backend for Frontend to simplify authentication in an Angular SPA #aspnetcore #identityserver4 #angular

For longer than I care to admit I’ve been trying to find an easy to implement authentication system with my Angular SPA. I’ve looked at rolling my own, utilizing Identity Server and the oidc-connect.js library, Auth0, as well as probably a half dozen other options. After experimenting around, reading blogs and articles on the subject, and checking out some sample implementations I’ve settled on a solution geared towards Single Page Applications (SPAs).

What I’ve picked is known as a Backend for Frontend architecture that uses Identity Server to manage authentication. The structure of the solution moves a lot of the authentication logic out of the SPA and into the backend .NET API. This means that instead of the SPA receiving a JSON Web Token (JWT) after authentication, and then managing the refresh and expiration of said token, the backend API will take ownership of managing the authenticated session and provide the SPA with a way to associate itself with that session. Besides these reasons, there are also security reasons for picking this type of implementation over a more client heavy implementation. Take a look at the post by Dominick Baer on his blog Least Privilege where he goes over many of these reasons. In fact the basis for my example implementation is based on his example from that post.

What I’ve changed from Dominick’s example is that I’ve added an Angular SPA project with a .NET BFF to manage the authenticated sessions. Additionally I swapped out the usage of ProxyKit as a reverse proxy with Microsoft’s Reverse Proxy. ProxyKit‘s development has ceased and the owner recommends migrating over to Microsoft’s implementation. While Reverse Proxy is still in preview it hopefully we will have a 1.0 release in the next few months.

The code for my example project can be found on GitHub. Admittedly there is a lot going on in this project. If you are running the solution in Visual Studio you will want to kick off the SpaHost and CrossDomainApi projects at the same time. The SpaHost will run on it’s own but one of the pages does pull down data from the CrossDomainApi when the user is authenticated so it is good to have them both running.

As it is currently implemented the project uses the publicly available Demo Identity Server. Both the HostSpa and CrossDomainApi point to this Identity Server. The CrossDomainApi checks for a JWT encoded Bearer Authentication header that contains an audience of api. If this isn’t present then the API request from a client will be denied.

The HostSpa hosts the Angular SPA and a reverse proxy to direct some requests to external services, in this case the CrossDomainApi. The configuration for utilizing Identity Server and defining the Reverse Proxy are all performed in the Startup.cs. The Reverse Proxy itself reads it’s configuration out of the appsettings.Development.json. However, in order to include the Bearer token in requests to proxied endpoints, code is added to the endpoint mapping which pulls the JWT out of the context and adds it to the Header.

endpoints.MapReverseProxy(proxyPipeline =>
{
   // The proxied controllers need the bearer token
   proxyPipeline.Use(async (context, next) =>
   {
      // If we are authenticated than we should be able to get the access token
      // from the context associated with this session
      var token = await context.GetTokenAsync("access_token");
      context.Request.Headers.Add("Authorization", $"Bearer {token}");

      await next().ConfigureAwait(false);
   });
});

The majority of the remaining code in the class deals with setting up the identity provider. I highly recommend reading the documentation for Identity Server 4 if you are unsure what all is being defined. Besides the standard OIDC configuration there are also lines of code which setup the token management and storage.

Managing access tokens takes a lot of work. You need to handling refreshes, sliding windows, revocation, storage, etc. Luckily the developers of Identity Server created a .NET library, IdentityModel.AspNetCore, which handles all of this for you. Documentation on it can be found in the Identity Server 4 documentation site.

// We want to enable the automatic management of tokens, auto refresh, in-memory storage
services.AddAccessTokenManagement();

The other piece of the puzzle is where will the tokens be stored. For development purposes keeping the tokens in memory is a suitable solution. For that we can use the AddDistributedMemoryCache() feature which you can learn more about it and other options on the documentation site. This will keep the tokens in memory for as long as the site is running.

// Enable the in-memory storage of tokens. In production or a multi-hosting environment
// you will want to use a SQL Server or Redis-like cache so tokens aren't lost during a
// reboot or deployment.
services.AddDistributedMemoryCache();

Within the Angular SPA the authentication piece is very limited. We don’t handle any of the actual authentication process. Instead we redirect the user to a controller that returns a view which requires the user to be authorized via the [Authorize]decorator. By loading this view the user will be automatically directed to the Identity Server configured in the Startup.cs class if they don’t have an active session. To see the controller logic take a look at the AccountsController.cs class. Within it you will see a function called Index(string redirect) which takes a single parameter, redirect. The value of this variable determines where the user will be sent to after they have been authenticated.

Once the user is authenticated they will have full access to the SPA site. A demonstration of how to restrict users access via authorization guards and how to force a user to authenticate when they access a publicly available page is available in the SpaHost project. Review the fetch-authenticated-data, guarded-root, auth-guard, app.module for details.

Please take a look and let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. I hope this post and the BackendForFrontend GitHub project are able to help you on your project.

TLDR; Go to my BackendForFrontend project on GitHub to see an example solution which uses Microsoft’s Reverse Proxy, Identity Server 4, and Angular to simplify identity configuration in a SPA.

Visualizing #D3JS line chart curve styles in #AngularIO

Prior to writing this post I hadn’t realized just how many line charting algorithms D3.js provided. When I started reading about them I thought there would be a fair share of configuration in order to get each one working but to my surprise it was dead simple. With a single line of code a chart can use one of the 18 line curves options that D3.js provides.

In a previous post, Adding a #D3.js line chart to an #Angular.io project, I went over how to create a D3 line chart in Angular. This post will expand on that work to show the various curve options and how to display visual indicators of data points on a chart. If you aren’t familiar with how to get a D3.js chart to work in Angular.io then take a look at the earlier post to get started.

The completed project can be seen running on StackBlitz and the code is available at GitHub. The example shows the following line curves.

  • Default
  • curveBasis
  • curveBasisOpen
  • curveBasisClosed
  • curveBundle
  • curveCardinal
  • curveCardinalOpen
  • curveCardinalClosed
  • curveCatmullrom
  • curveCatmullromOpen
  • curveCatmullromClosed
  • curveLinear
  • curveLinearClosed
  • curveMonotoneX
  • curveMonotoneY
  • curveNatural
  • curveStep
  • curveStepBefore
  • curveStepAfter

As mentioned earlier selecting your curve style is extremely simple. When initializing the line component of the chart, the curve style can be set by calling the curve() function on the line and pass the function for the algorithm to generate the curve. If, for example, you want the line to follow the Cardinal curve algorithm then you would apply that curve by doing line.curve(d3.curveCardinal) before adding the line to the graph svg element. Amazingly enough, that is it. As long as you are going to use a built-in curve you are done.

One thing I noticed was that with some of the curves it can be difficult to tell where the actual data point resides on the chart. To help visualize those points we can add markers to the chart. This next section of code will add a red circle marker with a radius of 5 pixels on each data point.

this.circleMarkers = this.svg
  .selectAll("circle")
  .data(this.data)
  .enter()
  .append("circle")
  .attr("fill", "#ff0000")
  .attr("cx", (d: any) => this.x(d.date))
  .attr("cy", (d: any) => this.y(d.value))
  .attr("r", 5);

The result of a cardinal curve applied to the data and the display of the data points with red circles is shown in the image below . Take a look at all of the examples which are using the same data set but implement different curves to see how the curves differ in style.

Showing an #Angular Component in place of #LeafletJS popup dialog

In an earlier post we went over the steps to add a LeafletJS map to an Angular application. The example initialized the map to be centered over Europe and then when the user clicked on a button the map would pan over to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA and draw a circle marker over the city. To improve the usability of the map we are going to add a custom Angular component as the popup that appears when the user clicks on the circle. We’ll also show how to pass data to the component so it can be customized based on the marker clicks.

Starting off we’ll use the code from the original map project, angular-ivy-leaflet-map, as the base for this project. The completed solution for this post can be found on GitHub and a working demonstration can be seen on StackBlitz.

To show a custom popup we’ll create a new component that will serve as the popup dialog. From the console window generate the boiler plate code for the CustomPopup component via

ng g component CustomPopup

In the CustomPopup folder open the custom-popup.component.html file and add {{customText}} in a paragraph element that will serve as the dynamic text element that we’ll set from the calling component.

<h1>Custom Popup</h1>
<p>
An angular component rendered as a map popup.
</p>
<p>
  {{customText}}
</p>

In order to allow the parent component to set the value of the {{customText}} property we need to add it to the custom-popup.component.ts as an @Input property. This will also require adding Input as an import from @angular/core. This is no different then the normal way to pass data to a component in Angular.

import { Component, OnInit, Input } from '@angular/core';

@Component({
  selector: 'app-custom-popup',
  templateUrl: './custom-popup.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./custom-popup.component.css']
})
export class CustomPopupComponent implements OnInit {
  @Input() customText: string
  constructor() { }

  ngOnInit() {
  }
}

With the popup component complete the next step is to add code to the map component so it will use this CustomPopupComponent instead of the default LeafletJS popup.

For the Angular component to be usable by LeafletJS we need the component to be “transformed” into its final HTML and JavaScript form. Without the component in its final form, LeafletJS will have no idea what to do with component reference when it renders the popup.

Now I can’t take credit for this code that generates the usable form of the component. Credit goes to Darkguy2008 who had run into the exact same issue with LeafletJS that this post is going over. The code uses Angular’s ComponentFactoryResolver to transform the referenced component into a usable form. What follows is my understanding of how Angular renders the component on the fly.

The resolveComponentFactory() builds a model of the component based on its HTML and TypeScript definition. All external references are verified and linked to model. Then when the create() method is called it iterates through the component and builds its final form based on the model from the factory method result. Finally, the built component is attached to the view via the application reference and surround it with a div element so that no matter how the component is defined it has a single parent element for the popup.

private compilePopup(component, onAttach): any {
   const compFactory: any = this.resolver.resolveComponentFactory(component);
   let compRef: any = compFactory.create(this.injector);

   if (onAttach)
     onAttach(compRef);

   this.appRef.attachView(compRef.hostView);
   compRef.onDestroy(() => this.appRef.detachView(compRef.hostView));

   let div = document.createElement('div');
   div.appendChild(compRef.location.nativeElement);
   return div;
}

The last step is to call the compilePopup() method and pass the rendered view to the marker for the popup. We assign the generated view to the markerPopup variable and then assign it to the marker as the popup view through the bindPopup() method call. One other thing to note is the assignment of the customText variable for the CustomPopupComponent. We pass the assignment as an anonymous function that takes the component as a parameter. It then references the built instance and sets the @Input customText variable.

let markerPopup: any =
this.compilePopup(CustomPopupComponent,
(c) => {c.instance.customText = 'Custom Data Injection'});
// Generate a circle marker for this location
let currentLocation: L.CircleMarker = L.circleMarker([lat,
lng], { radius: 5})
// Add a binding for the popup to show a custom component
// instead of the standard leaflet popup
.bindPopup(markerPopup);

The final solution can be seen in action below or at StackBlitz. If you are running the project you will need to click on the Locate Philadelphia, PA button and then click on the circle marker to display the popup. To see the full project source code go to GitHub.

Adding maps to an #Angular application using the #Leaflet library

If you are looking to add maps to your Angular website or application a great option that I’ve used on a few projects is Leaflet.js. The library provides features like custom markers, ability to use various map sources, multiple layers, and much more. In addition to that it is also free, open source, and actively maintained. The project has been around for years and has an active community continuing to extend it with numerous plugins. The majority of documentation out there for the library focuses on using it in a vanilla JavaScript project so in this post we’re going to explore adding Leaflet.js to an Angular Ivy project.

In this application we’ll create a component that will hold the map object. It will be configured to always show Europe when it starts up but also provide a button to pan the map to a specific location. The user can change the zoom or move the map around as they wish. There will also be callbacks setup to execute when the user changes the zoom level or the center of the map. You can see the complete project on GitHub. A running example can also be seen on StackBlitz.

To start off, if you don’t already have an Angular app to add the mapping feature to, create a new one.

$ ng new leaflet-map-example

Once the project is initialized we will need to add references to Leaflet and its Typings definition to the project. This can be done by opening the package.json file and adding
"leaflet": "^1.6.0"
to the dependencies section. In devDependencies add
"@types/leaflet": "^1.5.7"

Another location that needs to be updated is the angular.json file. Under "projects" --> "demo" --> "architect" --> "build" --> "options" --> "assets" add this code that will copy leaflet assets out to the leaflet folder during the build process.

{
    "glob": "**/*",
    "input": "./node_modules/leaflet/dist/images",
    "output": "leaflet/"
}

Also, just below the "assets" section should be the "styles" section. In this section add this line so we can bring the Leaflet styles over to the application during the build.

"./node_modules/leaflet/dist/leaflet.css"

Next we’ll want to create a new component that will hold our logic for this map. From the command line run:

$ ng generate component map

We should now have a new folder in our project called map that contains three files: map.component.css, map.component.html, map.component.ts. The majority of our work will be in the TypeScript file but we still do need to add some code to the CSS and HTML files.

In map.component.html we’ll add two <div> tags, one to encompass the HTML for the page and another to hold the map. At the bottom of the page we will have a button that calls a function in the TypeScript code to pan the map on a specific location.

<div class="map-container">
  <div id="map"></div>
  <br />
  <button (click)="centerMap(39.95, -75.16)">Locate Philadelphia, PA</button>
</div>

Next we’ll add some CSS to define the size and add a border to the map in map.component.css. 

#map{
  border: 2px solid black;
  height: 400px;
  width: 100%;
}

With the scaffolding in place we can now focus on map.component.ts to add the code which will instantiate and customize the actual map. The first line of code we’ll add is to import the Leaflet library at the top of the file.

import * as L from "leaflet";

Within the class definition add a variable to hold the map object.

map: L.Map;

We’ll setup the actual actual initialization of the map object and tie it to the HTML DOM in the ngOnInit() function.

The map object will be configured to center the map on a latitude and longitude over Europe. We’ll have the zoom level set to 4 and restrict the permitted zoom levels to be between 1 and 10. Besides those properties the most important part of the initialization is the first parameter, 'map'. This value matches up to the ID field in one of the map.component.html <div> elements and tells Leaflet to use that element to render the map.

// Initialize the map to display Europe    
this.map = L.map('map',
 {
      center: [49.8282, 8.5795],
      zoom: 4,
      minZoom: 1,
      maxZoom: 10
});

Before anything can be displayed we also need to let Leaflet know where to retrieve the tiles for the map. If you aren’t familiar with tiles they are the background image that is displayed. These can be road maps, start charts, or any other image. In this example the tiles are pulled from the OpenStreetMap.org repository. We’ll do this by creating a Tile Layer and then add that layer to the map object.

const tiles = L.tileLayer('https://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {
  maxZoom: 10,
  attribution: '&copy; <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a>'
});

tiles.addTo(this.map);

In the HTML for the component there is a button that calls a centerMap() function, passing it latitude and longitude values. When called, this function will pan the map over to the new center coordinates, draw a circle marker on that location, and zoom to a specific level.

centerMap(lat: number, lng: number): void {
this.map.panTo([lat, lng]);
// Generate a circle marker for this location
let currentLocation: L.CircleMarker =
L.circleMarker([lat, lng], {
radius: 5
});
currentLocation.addTo(this.map);
// Wait a short period before zooming to a designated level
setTimeout(() => {this.map.setZoom(8);}, 750);
}

With the definition of the map component completed we need to add the component to the app.component.html file so that we can actually see it in the applicaiton.

<app-map></app-map>

There is one last piece of the puzzle that we need to add in order for the maps to be displayed correctly. We need to reference the Leaflet CSS code in the project’s styles.css file. Without the reference we won’t be able to pull the styles into the project.

@import "~leaflet/dist/leaflet.css";

If you forget this piece you’ll see a partial map appear on the site. A few squares of the map will be visible and if you look in the Console window you won’t see any errors reported. The fact that you missed the styles file isn’t obvious so be sure to include it.

At this point we should be able to run the project and see the map displayed similar to the below image. 

$ ng serve

Then when you click on the Locate Philadelphia, PA button it will pan the map over to the city and draw a marker on the city.

If there is a need to take actions when the user changes the zoom level of the map or drags the map to a new location it can be achieved by adding listeners to the "zoomlevelschange" and "moveend" events. In this example we’ll add them during the initialization of the map.

// Initialize the map to display Europe
this.map = L.map('map', {
center: [49.8282, 8.5795],
zoom: 4,
minZoom: 1,
maxZoom: 10
}) // Create a callback for when the user changes the zoom
.addEventListener("zoomlevelschange", this.onZoomChange, this)
// Create a callback for when the map is moved
.addEventListener("moveend", this.onCenterChange, this);

From these callbacks you can grab the new center, zoom level, or map boundaries by accession the map object referenced via the this object. You can see examples of these in the map.component.ts file.

Hopefully this post helps get you on your way adding Leaflet maps to your Angular project. Besides a few behind the scenes updates of files the process is straight forward. In a future post I’ll go over adding markers and custom popup dialogs.

Easy #Angular #Authentication and #Authorization setup using #DOTNETCORE

For the last few months I’ve been struggling to find an authentication and authorization setup that felt right for one of my projects. My requirements were basic. Have a system that I could use to limit access to my API endpoints and front-end components based on the roles of a given user. The back-end was to be written in C# using .NET Core 3.1 and the front-end in TypeScript and Angular.io. The system would also be self-contained, i.e. no external login providers.

Initially I used the default template from Visual Studio for generating an ASP.NET Core Web API project that uses a SPA framework for the front-end and IdentityServer 4 (IS4) to handle the authentication and authorization. It was a nice setup which makes it easy to tie in outside providers (i.e. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc) so users can signup using their login from another site. If you aren’t familiar with IS4 then reading the documentation and going through the various examples are a must. The drawbacks I saw was the complication of the system seemed greater than what my project needed and the authentication process required either a popup window, navigating away from the client site, or adding custom security headers to allow the login page to appear in a iframe.

So I went back to searching for other ways to handle authentication and authorization with .NET Core and reading up on the core concepts. Honestly reading the IS4 documentation was also a great way learn. After a few weeks I found a great write-up by Ankit Sharma titled Policy-Based Authorization In Angular Using JWT. Not only was the post well written, if you download the code from their GitHub repository it actually works!

The author goes through the process of creating a new ASP.NET Core 3.1 Web API project and a separate client app using Angular.io 8.3. The client will receive a JSON Web Token(JWT) that includes some basic information about the user, including the roles associated with the account. With this data the client can enable routes and features with basic checks and route guards.

The implementation is well thought out which makes conceptualizing how you could add new features easier. Some of the features that one might want to add are incorporating an auto-refresh of the token while the user is on the site, changing the credentials and auth data storage from in-memory to a database, adding password changes, logging out all active sessions for a user, or registering new users.

Yes, the author didn’t go over these but they did provide a solid foundation to start experimenting. Now if you do need all of these options then maybe revisiting IdentityServer 4 is a good idea since it provides a ready built framework to build a full-fledged identity management system. But for a simpler setup, the write-up by Ankit Sharma is a great starting point.

Adding a #D3.js line chart to an #Angular.io project

D3.js (Data Driven Documents) is a powerful JavaScript library. At a basic level you can transform data into interactive charts and graphics that are easy to digest by your visitors. If you aren’t familiar with the library then take a look at their site for examples. I’ve also added a few links to other sites that showcase the capabilities.

While D3 provides documentation on the API and tutorials they also recommend looking at the examples from other developers to see how it all works. If you are looking for an example to show you how to get a basic line chart then you can use this post or look at their Line Chart example for a pure JavaScript implementation.

The example I’ve built for this post displays three different types of weather information for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Tempareture, Dewpoint, and Visibility. The example also has a button that the user can click on to change the displayed weather information. The data for the chart is stored in a JSON file in the assets directory of the project but it could have just as easily been an HTTP request to an API. To see the code for the example take a look at my GitHub repository angular-d3-line-chart-demo. If you’d like to see the chart in action then head over to Stackblitz.com for a running example. The rest of the post will go over the implementation as a technical discussion with references back to the code in the repository.

Adding D3.js to the Angular project requires adding the D3 core logic package and it’s associated Types files to the project. You may also need to add these other packages: d3-array, d3-axis, d3-scale, and d3-shape. Keep these packages in mind if you run into errors mentioning those packages. While I didn’t need them in my personal project, it is in Angular.io 8, I did need them when I was building this example on Stackblitz.com which is in Angular.io 9.

npm install --save d3
npm install --save-dev @types/d3

In order to encapsulate the chart related elements I created a custom component called line-chart.component. This component holds the chart, labels and controls to show the current type of data being displayed as well as a button to change the data. The encapsulated component can now be reused on the same page to show different data while providing the same user experience.

ng g component LineChart

When the component first initializes we need to configure the element that will contain the graph. When working with D3.js charts the element is an SVG. Within the buildSVG() function you’ll see all of the initial configuration performed on this SVG.

  • Grab the SVG element owned by this component, a simple task since it is owned by the component and there is only one SVG element
  • Set the height and width of SVG based on margin calculations
  • Add text to serve as a watermark in the chart

Because the chart data is dynamic the configuring of the X and Y axis aren’t performed during the initial configuration of the SVG. Instead, once the data is retrieved we’ll transform it into a format that is easily digested by the chart and the maximum/minimum values for the axis can be extracted.

The starting point for the data selection, transformation, and update of the graph occurs in the updateGraphData() function. This function is called during the component initialization as well as when the user clicks Change Chart Data button. From here the following functions are executed that will refresh the chart with the latest information.

  • clearChartData() – finds all path elements, lines on the chart, and removes them from SVG element.
  • buildChartData() – transforms the original JSON data into a simplified object containing a value and date field for consumption by the chart logic.
  • configureYaxis() – the Y-axis is going to represent some kind of numerical data. For this we can use the d3Array.scaleLinear(). Because we don’t want to have any of the data resting on the X-axis line we reduce minimum of the Y-axis range by 1. D3.js provides a function that will retrieve the minimum and maximum values in an array called d3Array.extent().
  • configureXaxis() – the X-axis is going to represent a time series so we’ll generate a scale based on the date property of the data and using d3Array.scaleTime().
  • drawLineAndPath() – the function uses the d3Shape.line() function to configure which parts of the data will be associated with the X and Y-axis. It also defines the look of the line, i.e. color and thickness.

With all of these functions combined we are able to initialize, configure, and draw the line chart as part of an Angular.io component. Other features that could be added are line tool tips, transitions between chart drawing, and showing two sets of data at one time. As I learn more about building charts with D3.js I will add new posts to describe how to add those features.

As mentioned earlier, take a look at the GitHub repository for all of the code. I’m going to continue updating and cleaning up the project as I learn more about D3.js line charts. Because of that I didn’t include any of the code in this post. I didn’t want to leave readers with one version discussed in the blog post while a newer version exists in the repo. If you have any questions or run into problems leave me a comment and I’ll see if I can help out.