Question

Are there free resources available that I could use to password protect webpages on a per-user basis?

Asked by: Jason_Place

Hello,

We want to have a login area on our website where a user can log in, and be presented with a list of files based on their identity.  For example, user A logs in and is presented with two word documents and a visio diagram, but when user B logs in, he is presented with an Autocad file and an excel spreadsheet.

We need to be able to create new logins/passwords and associate the appropriate files.  Is anyone aware of any free/open source solutions to this that are available online?  It seems like a fairly standard thing.  I'm guessing that PHP would be the best way to do this, but I'm certainly open to other suggestions.

As far as resources go, we have PHP running, we have a MySQL database available if needed, and given instructions I could probably figure out how to install any java or perl scripts.  I'm not a programmer by any means, but I have enough passing familiarity with PHP/MySQL that I can usually implement packages that are already written.

Thanks all!

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Asked On
2009-03-12 at 05:49:56ID24223532
Tags

Web site

,

HTML

,

PHP

,

Java

Topics

Scripting Languages

,

PHP Scripting Language

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
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Answers

 

by: synxPosted on 2009-03-12 at 07:04:22ID: 23868377

It sounds like you are looking at creating a web portal.  I don't have experience programming these, but they are becoming quite popular.  I could be wrong, but I think it would be difficult to find a free web portal dev. kit.

However... I have some sites that have user logons that stores per-user information in a database.  On a very high-level, here's a solution that could work for you.  It would require two tables:

1. Users - this would have the user name as the key, as well as password, first name, last name, email address, etc.  You would have one row for each user
2. Files - this would contain at least two fields - user name and file name (or path).  If you need to specify a key, it could be a combination of the two fields.  For each user, add a row for each file that you want them to have access to.  So you would have multiple rows specifying the same user name, but different file names.

On your application, you have a login screen.  The user presents username and password, and the PHP script looks them up against the Users table.  If a match is found, move on to the next page.  If not, redirect back to the login page... and maybe throw up a "Invalid username/password" message.

After logging in successfully, the next page would do a SQL lookup in the Files table.  Assuming you stored the user name into a variable called $username, the SQL would look something like "SELECT Filename FROM Files WHERE USER = $username".  This will populate your recordset with all files that that user has access to.  Then loop through the results, and for each Filename that you retrieved, built a link (<A HREF...>) to that file.  

It's a pretty quick and dirty explanation, but I think this would work - and each user that logged in would only see the files that you have specified in the Files table for that user.

Does that make sense?

 

by: bartonjo2Posted on 2009-03-12 at 08:45:17ID: 23869754

 

by: Jason_PlacePosted on 2009-03-13 at 05:17:27ID: 31557226

Perfect, exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.  Got it up and running last night.  Thanks!

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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