Events in Spring security

Events can be very useful in application development. When we want to intercept a particular action throughout an application, we can make use of events. Let’s take an example of spring security event InteractiveAuthenticationSuccessEvent. When a user is authenticated successfully, spring security fires InteractiveAuthenticationSuccessEvent which has the Authentication object using which we can fetch user details. It can be used to perform some action when a user is logged in like storing login history of a user, maintaining last login timestamp etc..

Before we capture events, we have to enable spring security events using the following line in Config.groovy :

grails.plugin.springsecurity.useSecurityEventListener = true

Here is a code to capture login event:

package org.jft

import org.springframework.context.*
import org.springframework.security.authentication.event.InteractiveAuthenticationSuccessEvent

class LoginEventListener implements ApplicationListener {
@Override
void onApplicationEvent(ApplicationEvent event) {
if (event instanceof InteractiveAuthenticationSuccessEvent) {
String username = (String)event.getAuthentication().getPrincipal()
// you code goes here.............
}
}
}

We also need to register our class LoginEventListener as a spring bean in resources.groovy:

import org.jft.LoginEventListener

beans = {
loginEventListener(LoginEventListener)
}

You can write your own implementation in LoginEventListener and see your code in action 😉