Handling Sessions on Google App Engine with Android/IPhone

Question

I\'m starting to write an app whereby a mobile app (Android/IPhone) will communicate with the GAE backend (Python) through a series of Web API calls using JSON.

I can\'t

Answer 1

If you dont explicitly want to use Sessions etc. you can simply use the Datastore. Try following this:

1. Get a unique deviceID/email to identify each unique user.
2. On request from a specific user, generate a random authentication key, and store it attached to the user's email/deviceID and probably the current timestamp and a loggedIn flag.

SO you have:

User email/id: someone@example.com
password: xxxxxxxxxx
Key : 2131231312313123123213
Timestamp: 20:00 12-02-2013
loggedIn : boolean value

This can be database model. Now whenever the user logs in:

• Check email, password combination.
• If valid, generate random key, and update the datastore with the new key
• update timestamp with current time, and set loggedIn to True
• Now return the key back to the client (Android/iPhone) in a JSON object.

Now on every request, Check the received key against the one in your datastore, and if loggedIn flag is set to true. If both OK, process the request.

Also, on Logout:

• Just set the loggedIn flag in the datastore to False.

Hope this helps :)