Its needed to implement communication between several logged-in users (from one side) and an agent (or agents from another side).
Livechat is working good for agent-to-user chat, but how to connect several users in one livechat.
Default channel or private group functionality is not good for it, they have no agent-department relations and other things that has livechat. Also it requires additional development of client part.
So, how to configure livechat with multiple users?
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In some B2B applications that employ multi-tenancy, a single user can belong to multiple tenants. Slack, for example, allows the same user (email+password combination) to view all the workspaces (tenants) they belong to and alternate between them seamlessly. As users switch workspaces, the application switches context to the selected workspace, loading workspace-specific entities such as channels, messages, and threads.
Is it possible to do something similar with Google Identity Platform (GIP)?
I understand that in multi-tenancy in GIP, all users are scoped to zero or one tenants. If a person needs to belong to 2 tenants, 2 users must be created - each with their unique uid. This is not a big deal when users sign up with Federated Identity Providers. They see a consent screen twice, confirm, and the application can apply some logic to know they are the same person. For example, it can hash their email address, and link the two tenants to it.
But if users log in with email+password, such approach requires users to maintain two passwords for the same service, diminishing the user experience.
I imagine that one solution is to disable multi-tenancy and store the user-to-tenant links in Firestore, or perhaps as a custom claim so that Firestore Security Rules checks don't require an extra read on every request. However, this might make it harder to enforce different authentication requirements for different tenants. For example, a user may switch context to a tenant that requires 2FA as part of their policy, and it could be advantageous to have GIP manage that part.
Are there better approaches for such a scenario?
Woocommerce provides an API here which in order to use it, you have to provide a consumer key and consumer secret with a relevant authorization schema. What I fail to grasp is that, shouldn't be there an API for unauthorized / guest users ? I mean, I just want to create a display page (frontend) of available products, but without the need of generating CK/CS. Also looking in a similar question here
it seems that you cannot avoid using the keys. But a second question comes up. The frontend is not supposed to use the keys, because then the e-shop becomes exposed to the client. So, even by generating these keys in order to access woocommerce api, how am I supposed to correctly use them ? Please help me understand the flow.
TLDR;
Do NOT use CK/CS in front end. It's only for use in a secure backend. The keys can be used to read/write anything from products to, orders to all customer related information.
Based on you questions, I suspect APIs might not be the best way to do what you're intending to do. If you do need APIs, chances are, you have two backend servers communicating with each other. APIs are usually meant for use by other applications. For example, a lot of Point of Sale systems utilize this WooCommerce API. You might want to look into extending the WooCommerce plugin itself and creating end points to get the information or perform actions you need.
If you are not familiar with secure Authenticated APIs, I would highly suggest you familiarize yourself with them as failure to secure the website can result in huge financial losses to sensitive personal information leakage of the site users since WooCommerce APIs, at the time of this writing, only allows you to set read or write permissions with full access to everything.
With that in mind I will attempt to answer all of your questions one by one and give an idea of how you should use it.
To Answer your questions
What I fail to grasp is that, shouldn't be there an API for
unauthorized / guest users ? I mean, I just want to create a display
page (frontend) of available products, but without the need of
generating CK/CS
I'm guessing your misconception is that you need to use separate keys for each user. API keys are not meant to give access for front-end users. The API keys generated by the WooCommerece plugin gives full read/write access to any user to view/modify any information including that of other customers. Its meant for admins. If you check the official WooCommerce API reference for retrieving a customer you'll notice that you get to provide an id here. And if you check the response it shows everything from addresses to contact information.
The frontend is not supposed to use the keys, because then the e-shop
becomes exposed to the client. So, even by generating these keys in
order to access woocommerce api, how am I supposed to correctly use
them ?
Its quite simple actually. You just need to get between the communication between the front-end users and the WooCommerce API. If the users needs to be provided information from the WooCommerce end point, you need to get it for them using the CK/CS.
This way, you confirm what information is allowed to view/modify by whom, and the user does not need to be authenticated.
WooCommerce Endpoints <---> Your secure backend service/middleware/controller <---> front-end user
One thing to note though, is that you need to be careful about the parameters a front-end user is able to change in the request to your server end-point that is consuming the WooCommerce API key. A customer should not be able to change the id that is requesting their info for example. Id should be retrieved from the backend from the secure authentication information coming from the front-end.
Imagine the following situation. I have an API and a developer builds an application that retrieves new content from it on a daily base. She stores this content and provides this data to all the instances of an app she developed. In this way these apps do not have to call the API directly.
Is there a way to prevent this and force the apps (and therefore the end users) to use the API and not only the application on the server.
I found many questions about how to cache API data but not how to prevent that. I am fairly new to this, so maybe I am overlooking something or maybe it is not possible to prevent this.
Thank you in advance!
Assuming you are using Apigee for API-management, you have some options. First, consider the options available to you contractually, if this is that sort of business relationship and you can impose certain API behavior with a business partner through a contract.
Separate from the legal side of things, we remember that you control your API and the credentials you issue for use by your API clients. You cannot though control, practically, what a client developer does with the credentials you issue: she could promise to embed the credentials in the mobile apps' API client, but change her mind and use it centrally, and then design her mobile client to call into her central cache. If though you really insist that only mobile app clients should be calling your API and not a hub/cache server, then you could consider applying constraint policies on your API (within the Apigee proxy, such as Access Control). For instance, you could blacklist your partner's hub/cache server IP address, although that is weak security at best. Or, you could apply a constraint that only clients with certain identifying User-Agent strings (mobile OS, client) are allowed to connect to your API. Or use GeoIP filtering to allow only clients from certain regions, if that applies to your use-case.
Finally, depending on the data model, you might be able to rate-limit such that a bulk cache becomes impractical: if your edge-client use-cases is to fetch a single record, but a cache would have to hold thousands of records, then you could impose a per-client rate limit (Quota policy) which is no bother to individual mobile clients, but makes the work of a hub/cache server untenable.
Before I get to my question, let me sketch out a sample set of microservices to illustrate my dilemma.
Scenario outline
Suppose I have 4 microservices:
An activation service where features supplied to our customers are (de)activated. A registration service where members can be added and changed. A secured key service that is able to generate secure keys (in a multi step process) for members to be used when communicating with them with the outside world. And a communication service that is used to communicate about our members with external vendors.
The secured key service may however only request secured keys if this is a feature that is activated. Additionally, the communication service may only communicate about members that have a secured key AND if the communication feature itself is activated.
Because they are microservices, each of the services has it's own datastore and is completely self sufficient. That is, any data that is required from the other microservices is duplicated locally and kept in sync by means of asynchronous messages from the other microservices.
The dilemma
I'm actually facing two main dilemma's. The first is (pretty obviously) data synchronization. When there are multiple data stores that need to be kept in sync you have to account for messages getting lost or processed out of order. But there are plenty of out of the box solutions for this and when all fails you could even fall back to some kind of ETL process to keep things in sync.
The main issue I'm facing however is the actions that need to be performed. In the above example the secured key service must perform an action when it either
Receives a message from the registration service for a new member when it already knows that the secured keys feature is active in the activation service
Receives a message from the activation service that the secured keys feature is now active when it already knows about members from the registration service
In both cases this means that a message from the external system must lead to both an update in the local copy of the data as well as some logic that needs to be processed.
The question
Now to the actual question :)
What is the recommended way to cope with either bugs or new insights when it comes to handling those messages? Suppose there is a bug in the message handler from the activation service. The handler does update the internal data structure, but it fails to detect that there are already registered members and thus never starts the secure key generation process. Alternatively it could be that there's no bug, but we decide that there is something else we want the handler to do.
The system will have no reason to resubmit or reprocess messages (as the message didn't fail), but there's no real way for us to re-trigger the behavior that's behind the message.
I hope it's clear what I'm asking (and I do apologize if it should be posted on any of the other 170 Stack... sites, I only really know of StackOverflow)
I don't know what is the recommended way, I know how this is done in DDD and maybe this can help you as DDD and microservices are friends.
What you have is a long-running/multi-step process that involves information from multiple microservices. In DDD this can be implemented using a Saga/Process manager. The Saga maintains a local state by subscribing to events from both the registration service and the activation service. As the events come, the Saga check to see if it has all the information it needs to generate secure keys by submitting a CreateSecureKey command. The events may come in any order and even can be duplicated but this is not a problem as the Saga can compensate for this.
In case of bugs or new features, you could create special scripts or other processes that search for a particular situation and handle it by submitting specific compensating commands, without reprocessing all the past events.
In case of new features you may even have to process old events that now are interesting for your business process. You do this in the same way, by querying the events source for the newly interesting old events and send them to the newly updated Saga. After that import process, you subscribe the Saga to these newly interesting events and the Saga continues to function as usual.
I am using SignalR for displaying onscreen notifications in my web application(built using Asp.net MVC).
My question is How to show notifications to specific set of users eg. Display onscreen notifications to all the users with reader role?. The roles and user associated with roles are defined the database.
I have read it in the documentation where it is mentioned about groups. But i am not sure how to use it.
As you said, one of the ways to go is by using SignalR Groups.
Basically, when you start the connection to the SignalR hub, you can also include that user in a group, based on the type of account (try not to include the user in a group based on a client function call, do it on the server).
So each time the user connects, you can override the OnConnected method and add a user on the appropriate group (in the Groups object are stored ConnectionId strings.
Note - if you are going to scale the application, you will also need to add a backplane for the following reason: the groups and the connection ids are store in the memory of the server. If your application is load balanced, then you have multiple independent instances of the same application, each one with different connections.
The way to go here is to use a SignalR Backplane.
Hope this helps!
Best of luck!