[keycloak-dev] KEYCLOAK-2606 - Browsertab-Support for Cordova

[Gregor Tudan]

Figuring out the callback wasn’t to hard either - now the last missing piece is parsing the callback. Here we have the option of registering a universal link inside the Keycloak adapter which opens the app, or leaving this to the developer and provide a public method for it (like processCallback).

I’m not quiet sure on these options, what are your thoughts on this?

Could you elaborate a bit on this please?

Sure - The way those native browser tabs work is that the app requests to open a site, but has no access to what happens inside the browser. After the login is done, the browser redirects back into the app by using universal links. These URLs have be registered in the app, so the browser knows that it should pass those requests back. From there, we can get the oauth params (state and code) and fetch the token.

The question is: should we implement this kind of callback logic inside the adapter, or should we provide the user a method for completing the login process upon redirecting?

If we do this in the adapter, we would need to make some assumptions on the Cordova-Plugin being used and how the link is set up. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but we would need to document how to setup the app so that the redirect works. This would also fit nicely in the current API of the adapter.

The other option would be to leave it up to the user to handle the redirect and offer a callback for finishing the authorization. This would basically boil down to a method that takes the code and the state params (like processCallback in the current adapter). This would kind of break the API of the adapter, as the login method will behave differently for this native adapter.

To summarize: doing more stuff in the adapter would simplify things for the developer, but might not work for existing apps - i.e. if they use a different plugin for handling universal links.

I suggest starting with first option (handling redirects in the adapter) to get started - universal links don’t seem to be to widely used, so most apps shouldn’t run into problems with us picking a plugin for them. Maybe we can add another option to the adapter for manual redirect-handling later on.