961920 - Send user details along with fxAccount notifications

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

It would be helpful if the "login" and "verified" notifications sent by FxAccounts included details about the user.  It should be quite trivial to send the JSON serialized version of the account data with the notification.  This would mean that observers of the notification don't have to invoke the promise-based getSignedInUser() to determine what user it is.

Not attaching a patch yet as I thought I'd get reactions to the idea first, and I should wait for bug 952063 to land first.

Also, onlogout could also include the details for the user being logged out, but I'm not sure this is as valuable (and isn't necessary for my use-case)

So whatchya think?

Comment 1

[Nicolas Perriault (:NiKo`) — needinfo me if you need my attention]

As someone who is currently trying to implement a FxA-auth based service within the platform, I think that would be a very valuable addition indeed.

Comment 2

[Chris Karlof [:ckarlof]]

I'm sympathetic with this use case. However, as we move to representing the logged in user state as a first class object we give to relying services, I'm not sure if this approach completely avoids the need to call getSignedInUser(). That said, we could signal some textual information in the notification, if that helps with some use cases. (I'm assuming here you can only send strings in observer notifications: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XPCOM_Interface_Reference/nsIObserver)

Comment 3

[Nicolas Perriault (:NiKo`) — needinfo me if you need my attention]

> I'm not sure if this approach completely avoids the need to call getSignedInUser()

Well, if for example you want to generate an assertion, you're quite right. But you might just want some of the user details (eg. email address, account id)

> I'm assuming here you can only send strings in observer notifications

Could be JSON string? Not ideal though, as it would involve manual parsing, eek :/