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Read more about the article List all the Users Registered on SUSI.AI

List all the Users Registered on SUSI.AI

In this blog, I'll be telling on how SUSI admins can access list of all the registered users from SUSI-server. Following this, they may modify/edit user role of any registered user. What is User Role? A UserRole defines the servlet access right. Not all users are allowed to access all the data and services. For  example, To list all the users, minimal user role expected is ADMIN. This classification of users are inspired by the wikipedia User Access Levels, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_access_levels.While querying SUSI, Users are classified into 7 different categories, namely : BOT ANONYMOUS USER   REVIEWER ACCOUNTCREATOR ADMIN BUREAUCRAT * Please see that these are as of the date of publish of this blog. These are subject to change, which is very unlikely. All the users who are not logged in but interacting with SUSI are anonymous users. These are only subject to chat with SUSI, login, signup or may use forgot password service. Once a user login to the server, a token is generated and sent back to client to maintain the identity, hence acknowledging them. Privileged users are those who have special rights with them. These are more like moderators with much special rights than any other user. At the top level of the hierarchy are the admins. These users have more rights than anyone. They can change role of any other user, override decision of any privileged user as well. Let us now look at the control flow of this. First things first, make a component of User List in the project. Let us name it ListUsers and since it has to be accessible by those users who possess ADMIN rights, you will find it enclosed in Admin package in components folder. Open up index.js file, import Listusers component  and add route to it in the following way : ...//other import statements import ListUser from "./components/Admin/ListUser/ListUser"; ...//class definition and other methods <Route path="/listUser" component={ListUser}/> …//other routes defined Find a suitable image for “List Users” option and add the option for List Users in static appbar component along with the image. We have used Material UI’s List image in our project. ...// other imports import List from 'material-ui/svg-icons/action/list'; …Class and method definition <MenuItem primaryText="List Users" onTouchTap={this.handleClose} containerElement={<Link to="/listUser" />} rightIcon={<List/>} /> ...//other options in top right corner menu Above code snippet will add an option to redirect admins to ‘/listUsers’ route. Let us now have a closer look at functionality of both client and server. By now you must have known what ComponentDidMount does. {If not, I’ll tell you. This is a method which is given first execution after the page is rendered. For more information, visit this link}. As mentioned earlier as well that this list will be available only for admins and may be even extended for privileged users but not for anonymous or any other user, an AJAX call is made to server in ComponentDidMount of ‘listuser’ route which returns the base user role of current user. If user is an Admin, another method,…

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Read more about the article SUSI.AI User Roles and How to Modify Them

SUSI.AI User Roles and How to Modify Them

In this blog, I discuss what is ‘user-role’ in SUSI.AI, what are the various roles and how SUSI admins can modify/update a user’s roles. What is User Role? A UserRole defines the servlet access right. Not all users are allowed to access all the data and services. For  example, To list all the users, minimal user role expected is ADMIN. This classification of users are inspired by the wikipedia User Access Levels, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_access_levels.While querying SUSI, Users are classified into 7 different categories, namely : BOT ANONYMOUS USER   REVIEWER ACCOUNTCREATOR ADMIN BUREAUCRAT * Please see that these are as of the date of publish of this blog. These are subject to change, which is very unlikely. If SUSI is active as a bot on some bot integrated platform (like line or kik), the user role assigned to it will be that of BOT. This user role just has technical access to the server. All the users who are not logged in but interacting with SUSI are ANONYMOUS users. These are only subject to chat, login and signup. They may use forgot password service and reset password services as well. Once a user login to the server, a token is generated and sent back to client to maintain the identity, hence acknowledging them as USER(s). Users with role assigned as “REVIEWERS” are expected to manage the Skill CMS. There might be some dispute or conflict in a skill. REVIEWERS then take the access of skill data and finalise the conflict there itself for smooth functionality. ADMIN users are those who have special rights with them. These are more like moderators with much special rights than any other user. At the top level of the hierarchy are the BUREAUCRATS. These users have more rights than anyone. They can change role of any other user, override decision of any ADMIN user as well. Both admins and bureaucrats have the access to all the settings file on the server. They not only can look at the list, but also download and upload them. Now these users also have right to upgrade or downgrade any other user as well. All these user roles are defined in UserRole.java file. In each request received by the server, the user role of user making the request is compared with the minimal user role in getMinimalUserRole() method. This method is defined in AbstractAPIHandler which validates if a user is allowed to access a particular servlet or not. private void process(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response, Query query) throws ServletException, IOException { // object initialisation and comparsions // user authorization: we use the identification of the user to get the assigned authorization Authorization authorization = DAO.getAuthorization(identity); if (authorization.getUserRole().ordinal() < minimalUserRole.ordinal()) { response.sendError(401, "Base user role not sufficient. Your base user role is '" + authorization.getUserRole().name() + "', your user role is '" + authorization.getUserRole().getName() + "'"); return; } // evaluations based on other request parameters. } Now that we know about what User Roles actually are, let us look at how…

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Read more about the article Making Skill Display Cards Identical in SUSI.AI Skill CMS

Making Skill Display Cards Identical in SUSI.AI Skill CMS

SUSI.AI Skill CMS shows all the skills of SUSI.AI. The cards used to display all the skills follow flexbox structure and adjust their height according to content. This lead to cards of different sizes and this needed to be fixed. This needed to fix as the cards looked like this: The cards display following things: Image related to skill An example query related to skill in double quotes Name of skill Short description of skill Now to get all these, we make an ajax call to the following endpoint: http://api.susi.ai/cms/getSkillList.json?model='+ this.state.modelValue + '&group=' + this.state.groupValue + '&language=' + this.state.languageValue Explanation: this.state.modelValue: This is the model of the skill, stored in state of component this.state.groupValue: This represents the group to which skill belongs to. For example Knowledge, Communication, Music, and Audio, etc. this.state.languageValue: This represents the ISO language code of language in which skill is defined Now the response is in JSONP format and it looks like: Now we parse the response to get the information needed and return the following Card(Material UI Component): <Link key={el} to={{ pathname: '/' + self.state.groupValue + '/' + el + '/' + self.state.languageValue, state: { url: url, element: el, name: el, modelValue: self.state.modelValue, groupValue: self.state.groupValue, languageValue: self.state.languageValue, } }}> <Card style={styles.row} key={el}> <div style={styles.right} key={el}> {image ? <div style={styles.imageContainer}> <img alt={skill_name} src={image} style={styles.image} /> </div> : <CircleImage name={el} size='48' />} <div style={styles.titleStyle}>{examples}</div> </div> <div style={styles.details}> <h3 style={styles.name}>{skill_name}</h3> <p style={styles.description}>{description}</p> </div> </Card> </Link> Now the information that leads to non-uniformity in these cards is the skill description. Now to solve this we decided to put a certain limit to the description length and if that limit is crossed, then we will show the following dots: “...”. The height and width of the cards were fixed according to screen size and we modified the description as follows: if (skill.descriptions) { if (skill.descriptions.length > 120) { description = skill.descriptions.substring(0, 119) + '...'; } else { description = skill.descriptions; } } This way no content was being cut and all the skill cards looks identical: Resources: JavaScript Substring function: https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_substring.asp Ajax guide on MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/AJAX/Getting_Started Material UI Card: http://www.material-ui.com/#/components/card CSS Flexbox tutorial : https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

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Read more about the article Implementing Author’s Skill Page in SUSI.AI CMS

Implementing Author’s Skill Page in SUSI.AI CMS

SUSI.AI Skill CMS is improving every day and we keep adding new features to it. Recently a feature was added to display all the skills by an author. This feature only showed the list of skills. The user might want to visit the skill page to see the description so we linked the skills on the list to skill page. The list looked like this: We need to link skill name and image to respective skill page. Now since this is react based app, we do not have different URL for different skills due to SPA. The description, images and other relevant details of skills were being passed as props. We needed to have routes through which we can directly access the skill. This was done by implementing child routes for Skill CMS. Earlier the description, images, and other relevant data was being passed as props from the BrowseSkill component, but now we need to derive this from the URL: let baseUrl = 'http://api.susi.ai/cms/getSkillMetadata.json'; let modelValue = "general"; this.name = this.props.location.pathname.split('/')[2]; this.groupValue = this.props.location.pathname.split('/')[1]; this.languageValue = this.props.location.pathname.split('/')[3]; url = baseUrl + '?model=' + modelValue + '&group=' + this.groupValue + '&language=' + this.languageValue + '&skill=' + this.name; We now make an ajax call to this URL for fetching the data: $.ajax({ url: url, jsonpCallback: 'pc', dataType: 'jsonp', jsonp: 'callback', crossDomain: true, success: function (data) { self.updateData(data.skill_metadata) } }); This updates the skill page with the description, image, author and other relevant details of the skills. Now all left to do is link the skills on the list to their respective links. This is done by following code: We define skillURL as: let skillURL = 'http://skills.susi.ai/' + parse[6] + '/' + parse[8].split('.')[0] + '/' + parse[7]; Here parse is an array which contains model, group and ISO language code of the skill. We updated the Image and text component as: <a href={skillURL} > <Img style={imageStyle} src={[ image1, image2 ]} unloader={<CircleImage name={name} size="40"/>} /> </a> <a href={skillURL} className="effect-underline" > {name} </a> Now after proper styling, we had the following looking skill list by author: Resources Ajax guide: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX Javascript split function: https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_split.asp Gettings skills by an author in SUSI.AI Skill CMS: .//getting-skills-by-an-author-in-susi-ai-skill-cms/ Using CSS hover effects: http://www.codeitpretty.com/2013/06/how-to-use-css-hover-effects.html

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Read more about the article Implementing Skill Detail Section in SUSI Android App

Implementing Skill Detail Section in SUSI Android App

SUSI Skills are rules that are defined in SUSI Skill Data repo which are basically the responses SUSI gives to the user queries. When a user queries something from the SUSI Android app, a query to SUSI Server is made which further fetches response from SUSI Skill Data and gives the response to the app. Similarly, when we need to list all skills, an API call is made to server to list all skills. The server then checks the SUSI Skill Data repo for the skills and then return all the required information to the app. Then the app displays all the information about the skill to user. User then can view details of each skill and then interact on the chat interface to use that skill. This process is similar to what SUSI Skill CMS does. The CMS is a skill wiki like interface to view all skills and then edit them. Though the app can not be currently used to edit the skills but it can be used to view them and try them on the chat interface. API Information For listing SUSI Skill groups, we have to call on /cms/getGroups.json This will give you all groups in SUSI model in which skills are present. Current response: { "session": {"identity": { "type": "host", "name": "14.139.194.24", "anonymous": true }}, "accepted": true, "groups": [ "Small Talk", "Entertainment", "Problem Solving", "Knowledge", "Assistants", "Shopping" ], "message": "Success: Fetched group list" } So, the groups object gives all the groups in which SUSI Skills are located. Next comes, fetching of skills. For that the endpoint is /cms/getGroups.json?group=GROUP_NAME Since we want all skills to be fetched, we call this api for every group. So, for example we will be calling http://api.susi.ai/cms/getSkillList.json?group=Entertainment for getting all skills in group “Entertainment”. Similarly for other groups as well. Sample response of skill: { "accepted": true, "model": "general", "group": "Shopping", "language": "en", "skills": {"amazon_shopping": { "image": "images/amazon_shopping.png", "author_url": "https://github.com/meriki", "examples": ["Buy a dress"], "developer_privacy_policy": null, "author": "Y S Ramya", "skill_name": "Shop At Amazon", "dynamic_content": true, "terms_of_use": null, "descriptions": "Searches items on Amazon.com for shopping", "skill_rating": null }}, "message": "Success: Fetched skill list", "session": {"identity": { "type": "host", "name": "14.139.194.24", "anonymous": true }} } It gives all details about skills: image author_url examples developer_privacy_policy author skill_name dynamic_content terms_of_use descriptions skill_rating Implementation in SUSI Android App Skill Detail Section UI of Google Assistant Skill Detail Section UI of SUSI SKill CMS Skill Detail Section UI of SUSI Android App The UI of skill detail section in SUSI Android App is the mixture of UI of Skill detail section in Google Assistant ap and SUSI Skill CMS. It displays details of skills in a beautiful manner with horizontal recyclerview used to display the examples. So, we have to display following details about the skill in Skill Detail Section: Skill Name Author Name Skill Image Try it Button Description Examples Rating Content type (Dynamic/Static) Terms of Use Developer’s Privacy policy Let’s see the implementation. 1. Whenever a skill Card View is clicked, showSkillDetailFragment()…

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Read more about the article Using Vector Images in SUSI Android

Using Vector Images in SUSI Android

Android designed to run across many devices with different screen sizes and display resolutions. One of the things that confuse many new Android developers is how to support multiple screen sizes. For making  SUSI Android app more user-friendly and interactive we used a lot of images in the form of drawable resources. Most of these drawables are in the form of PNG (Portable Network Graphic) and to support multiple screen size we have to include separate images of varied dimensions because we can’t scale PNG images without losing quality. Other disadvantages of using PNG images are PNG images take large disk space. PNG images have fixed colour and dimensions which cannot be changed. To overcome these shortcomings of PNG image we decided to use vector images in SUSI Android. Advantages of using vector image are It is smaller in size as compared to PNG i.e it takes less disk space than PNG. It can be scaled without losing quality. So we need to include only a single image for all screen size. Disadvantages of using vector image are Reconstruction of vector data may take considerably longer than that contained in a bitmap file of equivalent complexity because each image element must be drawn individually and in sequence. Vector image can’t be used to display complex photographs. If the object consists of a large number of small elements then file size grow very fast. Vector produce smaller size file than bitmap only for simple stuff. When it comes to creating a photographic quality vector where colour information is paramount and may vary on a pixel-by-pixel basis, the file can be much larger than its bitmap version, that’s why vector image is only suitable for small images like logo designs, icons etc. In this blog post, I will show you how we used vector images in SUSI Android. How to create vector image using Asset Studio tool Asset Studio is inbuilt Android Studio tool which we use to create a vector image from default material icon or local SVG images. To use vector asset in Android Studio Go to File> New > Vector Asset Vector Asset Studio Tool Window is prompted Create vector image from default material icon or local SVG image. Asset Studio will add icon in drawable. It can be used anywhere in the project. Vector images in SUSI Android In SUSI Android all drawable images like search, mic, arrow, check etc are vector images,  even the logo of the app is a vector image. This vector image is the result of code you can find here. Now I will describe some special attributes used here fillColor: It defines the colour of the image. So the colour of your image depends on the colour you provide in fillColor. We used white color(#ffffff) as fillColor that’s why the image is white in colour. strokeColour: It defines the colour of boundary of the image. pathData: Shape of your image depends on pathData. Different commands used in pathData are M: It is used to define…

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Read more about the article Implementing Change Password Feature in SUSI Android App using Custom Dialogs

Implementing Change Password Feature in SUSI Android App using Custom Dialogs

Recently a new servlet was implemented on the SUSI Server about changing the password of the logged in user. This feature comes in handy to avoid unauthorized usage of the SUSI Account. Almost all the online platforms have this feature to change the password to avoid notorious user to unethical use someone else’s account. In SUSI Android app this new API was used with a nice UI to change the password of the user. The process is very simple and easy to grasp. This blog will try to cover the API information and implementation of the Change Password feature in the android client. API Information For changing the password of SUSI Account of the user, we have to call on  /aaa/changepassword.json We have to provide three parameters along with this api call: changepassword:  Email of user (type string) using which user is logged in. password:  Old password (type string with min length of 6) of the user. newpassword: New password (type string with min length of 6) of the user. access_token: An encrypted access_token indicating user is logged in. Sample Response (Success) { "session": {"identity": { "type": "email", "name": "YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS", "anonymous": false }}, "accepted": true, "message": "Your password has been changed!" } Error Response (Failure). This happens when user is not logged in: HTTP ERROR 401 Problem accessing /aaa/changepassword.json. Reason: Base user role not sufficient. Your base user role is 'ANONYMOUS', your user role is 'anonymous' Implementation in SUSI Android App The change password option is located in Settings Activity and displayed only when user is logged in. So, if a logged in user wants to change the password of his/her SUSI AI account, he/she can simply go to the Settings and click on the option. Clicking on the options open up a dialog box with 3 input layouts for: Current Password New Password Confirm New Password So, user can simply add these three inputs and click “Ok”. This will change the password of their account. Let’s see some code explanation. When user clicks on the “reset password” option from the settings, the showResetPasswordAlert() method is called which displays the dialog. And when user clicks on the “OK” button the resetPassword method() in the presenter is called passing input from the three input layout as parameters. settingsPresenter.resetPassword(password.editText?.text.toString(), newPassword.editText?.text.toString(), conPassword.editText?.text.toString()) fun showResetPasswordAlert() { val builder = AlertDialog.Builder(activity) val resetPasswordView = activity.layoutInflater.inflate(R.layout.alert_reset_password, null) password = resetPasswordView.findViewById(R.id.password) as TextInputLayout newPassword = resetPasswordView.findViewById(R.id.newpassword) as TextInputLayout conPassword = resetPasswordView.findViewById(R.id.confirmpassword) as TextInputLayout builder.setView(resetPasswordView) builder.setTitle(Constant.CHANGE_PASSWORD) .setCancelable(false) .setNegativeButton(Constant.CANCEL, null) .setPositiveButton(getString(R.string.ok), null) resetPasswordAlert = builder.create() resetPasswordAlert.show() setupPasswordWatcher() resetPasswordAlert.getButton(AlertDialog.BUTTON_POSITIVE)?.setOnClickListener { settingsPresenter.resetPassword(password.editText?.text.toString(), newPassword.editText?.text.toString(), conPassword.editText?.text.toString()) } } In the resetPassword method, all details about the passwords are checked like: If passwords are not empty. If passwords’ lengths are greater than 6. If new password and confirmation new password matches     When all the conditions are satisfied and all the inputs are valid, resetPassword() in model is called which makes network call to change password of the user. settingModel.resetPassword(password,newPassword,this) override fun resetPassword(password: String, newPassword: String, conPassword: String) { if (password.isEmpty()) { settingView?.invalidCredentials(true,…

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Read more about the article Full-Screen Speech Input Implementation in SUSI Android App

Full-Screen Speech Input Implementation in SUSI Android App

SUSI Android has some very good features and one of them is, it can take input in speech format from user i.e if the user says anything then it can detect it and convert it to text. This feature is implemented in SUSI Android app using Android’s built-in speech-to-text functionality. You can implement Android’s built-in speech-to-text functionality using either only RecognizerIntent class or SpeechRecognizerIntent class, RecognitionListner interface and RecognizerIntent class. Using former method has some disadvantages: During speech input, it shows a dialog box (as shown here) and it breaks the connection between user and app. We can’t show partial result i.e text to the user but using the later method we can show it. We used  SpeechRecognizerIntent class, RecognitionListner interface and RecognizerIntent class to implement Android’s built-in speech-to-text functionality in SUSI Android and you know the reason for that. In this blog post, I will show you how I implemented this feature in SUSI Android with new UI. Layout design You can give speech input to SUSI Android either by clicking mic button or using ‘Hi SUSI’ hotword. When you click on mic button or use ‘Hi SUSI’ hotword, you can see a screen where you will give speech input. Two important part of this layout are: <TextView   android:id="@+id/txtchat"   android:layout_width="wrap_content"   android:layout_height="wrap_content"   …  /> TextView: It used to show the partial result of speech input i.e it will show converted text (partial) of your speech. <org.fossasia.susi.ai.speechinputanimation.SpeechProgressView   android:id="@+id/speechprogress"   android:layout_width="match_parent"   android:layout_height="50dp"   android:layout_margin="8dp"   android:layout_gravity="center"/> SpeechProgressView: It is a custom view which use to show the animation when the user gives speech input. When the user starts speaking, the animation starts. This custom view contains five bars and these five bars animate according to user input. Full-screen speech input implementation When the user clicks on mic button or uses ‘Hi SUSI’ hotword, a screen comes where the user can give speech input. As already mentioned I used SpeechRecognizerIntent class, RecognitionListner interface and RecognizerIntent class to implement speech-to-text functionality in SUSI Android. RecognizerIntent class starts an intent and asks for speech input val intent = Intent(RecognizerIntent.ACTION_RECOGNIZE_SPEECH) intent.putExtra(RecognizerIntent.EXTRA_LANGUAGE_MODEL,     RecognizerIntent.LANGUAGE_MODEL_FREE_FORM) intent.putExtra(RecognizerIntent.EXTRA_CALLING_PACKAGE, "com.domain.app") intent.putExtra(RecognizerIntent.EXTRA_PARTIAL_RESULTS, true) and send it through the speech recognizer. It does it through ACTION_RECOGNIZE_SPEECH. SpeechRecognizer class provides access to the speech recognition service. This service allows access to the speech recognizer and recognition related event occurs RecognitionListner receive notification from SpeechRecognizer class. recognizer = SpeechRecognizer       .createSpeechRecognizer(activity.applicationContext) val listener = object : RecognitionListener {  //implement all override methods } When the user starts speaking, the height of bars changes according to change in sound level. When sound level changes, onRmsChanged method get called where we are calling onRmsChanged method of SpeechProgressView class which is responsible for animating bars according to change in sound level. override fun onRmsChanged(rmsdB: Float) {   if (speechprogress != null)       speechprogress.onRmsChanged(rmsdB) } When user finished speaking onEndOfSpeech method get called where we call onEndOfSpeech method of SpeechProgressView class which is responsible for rotating animation. Rotation is used to show that SUSI Android has finished listening and now it is processing your input. override…

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Read more about the article API to List All Users on SUSI.AI

API to List All Users on SUSI.AI

In this blog, I discuss how the SUSI server helps in listing out all the users registered on it. The only role Susi server plays is, Whenever it receives a request at http://api.susi.ai/aaa/getUsers.json The server evaluate the parameters in the request, validates them and notify the user accordingly. API needs 2 parameters, out of which access-token is a necessary. 2nd parameter has to be one from the given list : Parameter Data type getPageCount boolean GetUserCount boolean Page integer On the basis of this 2nd parameter, server gets to know what does the client with given access-token is requesting. Server evaluates the access-token and validates that if the access token belongs to a user with user role atleast ADMIN, then the request is valid and proceed further with fetching the data in next step. Otherwise, server responds with error code “401” and error message “Base user role not sufficient”. It is advisable for clients that before redirecting users to admin panel or any other service, Please hit http://api.susi.ai/aaa/showAdminService.json And check that whether the user logged in is allowed to access the admin panel or not. The servlet /showAdminService.json is quite easy to understand for even those new to programming. Coming back to our topic, by now, server knows that this client is authorized to access the user list. But what all information does server needs to provide? In response to this request, server encodes following attributes in the JSON Array {which is part of JSON object} and sends it to user : Attribute Description Name Email-Id of the user Anonymous Is this user anonymous or not User Role User Role of the user Confirmed User has verified account or not Last Login IP Last IP from which login was requested Last Login Time Time when last login request was made Signup Time When did the user signed up First things first, check if enough parameters are provided or not. If not, respond with error stating “Bad Request. No parameter present”. Otherwise, server does a general iteration which has to be done irrespective of the 2nd parameter. First of all, get a list of all the authorized users using getAuthorizedClients method of Data Access Object class. This method picks up all the keys from authorized file {which are nothing but identification of clients from which requests are received}. Though it, skips those key which are host addresses (which can not be used to identify a user), it does includes all the email ids {which are obvious identification of users}. public static Collection<ClientIdentity> getAuthorizedClients() { ArrayList<ClientIdentity> i = new ArrayList<>(); for (String id: authorization.keys()) { if(id.contains("host")) continue; i.add(new ClientIdentity(id)); } return i; } In next steps, the collection is converted to suitable data types over which iterations are easy and can be converted to JSON objects and Arrays easily. After this, server evaluates which parameter is requested in the request. Let us pick each case one by one for simplicity. Client has requested number of pages in the request. Server finds the…

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Read more about the article Change Password for SUSI Accounts Using Access Token and Email-ID

Change Password for SUSI Accounts Using Access Token and Email-ID

In this blog, I discuss how the SUSI server synchronizes with SUSI Accounts and SUSI webchat for users to Change Password. When a user logs in, the clients store the email id of the user along with the access token in cookies. These are stored once the client gets a positive login response from the server. Both of these are required at the time of making the final call. Web clients store the email id and access token in the following way. cookies.set('loggedIn', loggedIn, { path: '/', maxAge: time }); cookies.set('emailId', email, { path: '/', maxAge: time }); First, the client has to ask the user to enter their current password. A javascript test is used to validate that at least 6 characters must be entered by the user. A similar test is run on the new password. But while confirming the password, client checks whether the user has entered the same password as new password or not. These are just the basics. In next stage (which is achieved only when all the above conditions are met), client encodes the email id (which it gets from cookies), current password, new password and the access token (which it again extracts from cookies). Now, Client just has to make an ajax request to the server. The response is processed and sent back to the client. Let us now look at PasswordChange Servlet. The base user role is defined as USER. Initial steps of the servlet are to extract the values form the request it receives. The values extracted from the request are in turn used to make a client’s identity. Before that, server checks if current and new password have same values or not. If not, then server returns a JSON response to user stating, “Your current password and new password matches”. Otherwise, it will continue its control flow as it is. Look at the code snippet below: if(password.equals(newpassword)){ result.put("message", "Your current password and new password matches"); result.put("accepted", false); return new ServiceResponse(result); } The reader here may think that they have discovered a hack. But they have not. Why? Because this is just the first step. In later stages, the hash of passwords are used to match to see whether the passwords match or not. To obtain a proper client identity, first a Client credentials object is made with support from the email id which is received in ‘changepassword’ attribute. Using the ClientCredentials object made above, an object of Authentication class is made. This object uses a method defined in its class to return a valid client identity. Using the client identity, value of password hash is extracted from the database along with the salt used to hash the password. If any error is encountered while extracting the client’s password hash value and/or salt value, an error is thrown towards the client, with a message stating “invalid credentials”. ClientCredential pwcredential = new ClientCredential(ClientCredential.Type.passwd_login, useremail); Authentication authentication = DAO.getAuthentication(pwcredential); ClientCredential emailcred = new ClientCredential(ClientCredential.Type.passwd_login, authentication.getIdentity().getName()); ClientIdentity identity = authentication.getIdentity(); String passwordHash; String salt;…

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