Staff login

Platform & Access · Staff login

Email + password authentication for back-office staff. On success a bearer token is stored in the ember-simple-auth session and the current user, their centers and their dashboards are loaded.

Area	Platform & Access
Routes	user.login
Centre modules	always available
Staff levels	any staff level
Models	staff-member
UI label	menu.navbar.logout / form-login
Coverage	3 use cases · 1 happy · 4 failure

Known issues (1)

• 🟠 Medium — Missing centre cookie produces unscoped queries

How it works

Auth state lives in the auth service: the token is aliased from session.data.authenticated.token, while the active centre is persisted as a cid cookie (max-age 86400) rather than in the session. auth.load() hydrates user + centers + dashboards and is re-run in routes/index.js#beforeModel because right after login those relationships are not yet in the store. The user is also pushed to Sentry (sentrySetUser).

Use cases

Why someone opens this (3)

• A centre manager signs in at the start of a shift to work on sales, proposals or customers.
• An admin with several centres signs in and then picks which centre to operate on.
• An external/API-level account authenticates to obtain a token.

Path map

flowchart LR
    F(["Staff login"]):::feat
    F --> H1["Successful sign-in"]:::ok
    F -.-> X1["Wrong credentials"]:::bad
    F -.-> X2["Centre cookie unavailable"]:::bad
    F -.-> X3["Role not recognised"]:::bad
    F -.-> X4["Session invalidated mid-use"]:::bad
    classDef feat fill:#4a5c8a,stroke:#4a5c8a,color:#ffffff,font-weight:bold
    classDef ok fill:#e3f1ea,stroke:#0d6b42,color:#0d4a2e
    classDef bad fill:#f7e6e2,stroke:#9a2d1c,color:#6e1f13

Happy paths

Successful sign-in

1. Staff member opens /user/login and enters email + password.
2. Credentials are posted to the API authenticator; a bearer token comes back.
3. auth.load() resolves the user, the list of accessible centres and the dashboards.
4. The cid cookie is set to the default centre and the app transitions to the desktop (index).
5. The side menu is rebuilt from the user’s role and the centre’s enabled modules.

Failure paths

Wrong credentials

Cause — API rejects the email/password pair.

What happens — The login form stays on screen and surfaces the authenticator’s error; no token is stored.

Centre cookie unavailable

Cause — Cookies blocked or cid missing — auth.getCookie throws NoCookieError.

What happens — centerId/centerGid getters swallow the error and return an empty string, so centre-scoped queries silently run without a centre filter. Worth treating as a known weak spot: the UI does not warn the user.

Role not recognised

Cause — auth.user.role is not one of the values in enums/staff-levels.

What happens — nf-navbar#menu returns [], so the user lands on an app with an empty navigation menu instead of an explicit error.

Session invalidated mid-use

Cause — Token expired or rejected by the API.

What happens — routes/application.js catches the failure and calls session.invalidate(), returning the user to login.

QA checklist

Tick these off while regression-testing this feature. The boxes are plain Markdown, so progress is visible in git diffs.

• ✅ Successful sign-in
• ⛔ Wrong credentials
• ⛔ Centre cookie unavailable
• ⛔ Role not recognised
• ⛔ Session invalidated mid-use

Implementation

• app/routes/user/login.js
• app/components/form/form-login.js
• app/authenticators/
• app/services/auth.js

Translation keys (3)

Key	English
menu.navbar.logout	Logout
pass-required	Use 10 or more letters, with at least 1 number, 1 capital letter and 1 lower letter
match-pass	The password fields do not match

Related

• Same area — Password reset request · Password update from reset link · Change own password · Idle auto-logout · Centre switching & multi-centre scoping · Server-incident banner · Desktop (home dashboard) · Runtime environment & white-label boot · Back-office interface language · In-app help & support chat (Froged)
• Shares data with — Intranet communications (threads, confirmations, authorisations) · Staff member list, deletion & restore · Staff member editor (levels, scope, API token) · Role & module permission layer · Customer action log (dormant)

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Generated from doc/feature-inventory.json · id platform-login · commit 276788ca6