Preview website as user / user-role of choice (masquerade-as function)

[nwaelkens]

Q	A
Bug?	no
New Feature?	yes

Actual Behavior

The admin can preview pages meant for registered users only, but misses the member-elements on that page (logged-in bar with menu, reaction-form, etc). This is quite confusing.

The preview in the backend partly ignores if you are logged in as a user or not.

1. It ignores my Accesscontrol rules defined in the websites' security.yml (that's good I guess).
2. In my twig-template I'm using {% if app.user %} to show/hide a member menu and/or other items for logged in users only. {% if app.user %} resolves always to false. That's unwanted behaviour and creates pages for the content-editor which do not exist.

Expected Behavior / Solution

The feature I'm proposing is a masquerade-as-user option within the preview. See my screenshots.
I suggest:

• if a website has 1-10 users, show them in the dropdown list box (see second screenshot)
• if a website has more users, use a text input field with auto-complete. Under the textfield there can be space for the 5 'used' users.

Just a suggestion off course. This would be a great tool to preview the website, specially in combination with SuluCommunityBundle.
Drupal has a module 'Masquerade' which does this. https://www.drupal.org/project/masquerade

My screenshots:

[alexander-schranz]

Think this is not easy to be implemented and maybe its part of the sulu community bundle /cc @wachterjohannes what you think?

@nwaelkens in the controller you know if you are in the preview: https://github.com/sulu/sulu/blob/develop/src/Sulu/Bundle/WebsiteBundle/Controller/DefaultController.php#L32 so you could set it to the view:

    public function indexAction(StructureInterface $structure, $preview = false, $partial = false)
    {
        $response = $this->renderStructure(
            $structure,
            [
                 'preview' => $preview,
            ],
            $preview,
            $partial
        );
        return $response;
    }

So you can check with {% if preview %} maybe this helps you.

[nwaelkens]

@alexander-schranz: That's for the moment indeed a solution for me, tnx!

[wachterjohannes]

I don't know how we should handle that in the admin. maybe we could do it in community-bundle but also there we don't know what changes when the user is logged in. the only way would be to fake the user - but this will be quite hard to achieve.

[alexander-schranz]

@wachterjohannes as we have an own kernel for Preview there could be an PreviewUserProvider this need only return a Symfony UserInterface for the roles. But don't know how much work is to add a roles dropdown in a third party bundle. And how to add a parameter which role is selected. But for me its definitly part of the community bundle.

[wachterjohannes]

tbh for the current UI this is nearly impossible to extend by a third party bundle. this should be part of 2.0 refactoring.

[danrot]

@alexander-schranz I also see that as a part of the CommunityBundle, therfore going to transfer the issue.