How to set up a basic mulit tenant app on Dittofi
In this article we are going to look at how you can set up a basic multi tenant app on Dittofi. We can do this in four quick and easy steps.
- Step 1: Create your data models
- Step 2: Generate your authentication endpoints
- Step 3: Build more endpoints and actions
- Step 4: Build your code and test
NOTE
In order to completely understand this article, we recommend that you either read Dittofi Quick Start and Dittofi Essentials first, and / or have a detailed understanding of what are Data Models, Variables, Endpoints, Actions and Events.
Furthermore, if you're not familar with what Multi Tenancy is, you can read our blog setting up single vs multi tenant apps on Dittofi.
For the purpose of this example we are going to create two data models, one called Users and one called Books. The Users data model will be used to hold all of the users that sign up to our app and will have two fields, Username (of type single line text) and Password (of type password). You can see an example of this below.
The Books data model will store a list of books that each user has created. These will have a title field (of type single line text) and also a creator_id field (of type number). You can see this table below.
NOTE
We have prepopulated our tables with data. You can do this also, however you MUST MAKE SURE that your creator_id column matches the Id's of your users in your Users table. This is because in the next step we are going to associate each book in your Books Table with a user in your Users Table and we are going to create this association by matching the data in the creator_id column in your Books Table with the id in your Users table.
Next, we are going to join the two tables together so that every user can have one set of books associated with them The association will be between the Id column in the Users table and the creator_id column in the Books table.
To do this, first go into the Table Relations tab within Dittofi's data models as shown below.
Next, click on the Books data model and add a new relation.
Fill in the form as below, this will join the Books table with the Users table where the users table will be the parent table.
Next, save and the table relation and return to your Table Relations view. You will see the following relationship has been created between the tables.
Next up, you need to create authentication endpoints. To do this, go to the Authentication Profiles tab that is located under the wrench icon in the bottom left of the Dittofi Design Studio.
Click on 
in the top right hand side of the Authentication Profiles tab to start building a new authentication profile. Fill in the form that pops up as below. This will create a new Authentication Profile with the name Simple auth.
Once you've saved your authentication profile, and before exiting your authentication profile click on 
.
This will give you the option to generate Sign Up, Login, Log Out and Rest Password endpoints, actions and workflows. You can see the endpoints generated by this click on the Endpoints tab inside the Dittofi Design Studio as shown below.
You can test the authentication endpoints by generating your code and running the endpoints from inside the Endpoints tab.
Next, we are going to create an endpoint for our app that will get the lists of books for ONLY the users that are authenticated to see them. To do this, create a new endpoint in the Endpoints tab as below. Make sure to set the authentication profile option in the endpoint to match the authentication profile that we created in Step 2.
Next, head over to the actions tab and create the endpoints corresponding Get Books action, as shown below.
** IMPORTANT ** Remember to link your action to your endpoint
Next, we need to configure our Get Books action to get data out of our Books model, ONLY for an authenticated user. To do this, we need to first add a variable of type Collection to our action.
Next, we our action to ONLY get the data for the user that is authenticated to see the data. This will be WHERE the creator_id from your Books Table is equal to the ID of the user, taken from your Users table.
To set up this WHERE clause, you can make use of a special Global Variable that was automatically created when we generated the code for our Authentication Profile in Step 2 and follow the steps in the GIF below.
Finally, press save and close the variable browser. The final step to set up your action is to make sure that the response variable from your action is set equal to the variable that we just created and which is going to store the list of books for a particular user. You can see this below.
The final step is to build the code and test. Build your code in the usual way, clicking
.
Next let's run our Get Books endpoint without first running our login endpoint. You can do this from within the endpoints tab, as shown below.
You will get a 401 error at this point with the error message being:
{
"data": null,
"message": "login required",
"error": "e_unauthorized"
}
This is because you have no logged in users.
If you run the Login endpoint and login one of the users inside your users table, what you will see is that if you then re-run your Get Books endpoint, this will only return data for that particular user.
Notice that the data that is returned all has the creator_id equal to 1 which is the same as the id for the logged in user james.virgo. You can see a print out of this below.
{
"data": [
{
"Id": 1,
"title": "100 years of solitude",
"creator_id": 1
},
{
"Id": 2,
"title": "The Sirens of Titan",
"creator_id": 1
},
{
"Id": 4,
"title": "The Autumn of the Patriarch",
"creator_id": 1
},
{
"Id": 5,
"title": "Journey to the center of the earth",
"creator_id": 1
}
],
"message": "success",
"error": ""
}
Similarly, if we logout this user and login our other user, we get only the books returned where the creator_id is equal to 2.
Notice, the data that is returned (as above) all has the creator_id equal to 2 which is the same as the id for the logged in user samuel.virgo. You can see a print out of this below.
{
"data": [
{
"Id": 6,
"title": "King Lear",
"creator_id": 2
},
{
"Id": 7,
"title": "Frank",
"creator_id": 2
},
{
"Id": 8,
"title": "The Kingdom Of This World",
"creator_id": 2
}
],
"message": "success",
"error": ""
}
Since neither user of our app can access the others, this is an example of a straightforward mulit tenant architecture that you can use. Of course you can also export the code from Dittofi and set it up any other way that you might like to.
To learn about how to set up a single tenant app with a code export, you can read Exporting and deploying my frontend code.