Open Source For Geeks: May 2018

Friday, 25 May 2018

Understanding difference between Cognito User Pool vs Identity Pool

Background

In one of the previous post, we saw how to setup Cognito Identity Pool for unauthenticated or authenticated access to AWS resources like S3. Cognito identity pool is used to federate users into AWS so that they can call AWS services. In this post, we are going to see what is the difference between Cognito user pool and identity pool.

Amazon Cognito User Pools

As per AWS documentation,

A user pool is a user directory in Amazon Cognito. With a user pool, your users can sign in to your web or mobile app through Amazon Cognito. Your users can also sign in through social identity providers like Facebook or Amazon, and through SAML identity providers. Whether your users sign-in directly or through a third party, all members of the user pool have a directory profile that you can access through an SDK.

User pools provide:

Sign-up and sign-in services.
A built-in, customizable web UI to sign in users.
Social sign-in with Facebook, Google, and Login with Amazon, as well as sign-in with SAML identity providers from your user pool.
User directory management and user profiles.
Security features such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), checks for compromised credentials, account takeover protection, and phone and email verification.
Customized workflows and user migration through AWS Lambda triggers.

Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/cognito-user-identity-pools.html

After successfully authenticating a user, Amazon Cognito issues JSON web tokens (JWT) that you can use to secure and authorize access to your own APIs, or exchange for AWS credentials.

Amazon Cognito Identity Pools (Federated Identities)

As per AWS documentation,

Amazon Cognito identity pools (federated identities) enable you to create unique identities for your users and federate them with identity providers. With an identity pool, you can obtain temporary, limited-privilege AWS credentials to access other AWS services.

Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/cognito-identity.html

Understanding the difference between Cognito User Pool vs Identity Pool

Above definitions can be very confusing, so let me simplify them for you.

Cognito user pool is nothing but your user management system backed by its own user directory. If you are building a new app or a website and you want to add authentication mechanism to sign in or sign up for your users you should use Cognito user pool. You can choose to have users sign in with an email address, phone number, username or preferred username plus their password. You can also use social identity providers for authentication and signing in or up for your app or website. Everything is under Cognito user pool umbrella. You can use their SDK provided to do this. Cognito user pool helps you maintain your user base details and their authentication. On successful authentication, it provides a JWT token that can be used to authenticate your custom server APIs as well.

Cognito identity pool is used when you need access to AWS services. It basically authenticates the user and if authentication is successful it will give you a temporary token that you can use to talk to AWS. For eg. let's say you want to upload a file to S3 then you can use this. I had written a post earlier to do just the same -

How to upload files to S3 from iOS app written in Objective C using AWS Cognito identity pool

Now how do you authenticate users to get these temporary credentials is something you decide. You could authenticate against the Cognito user group you have already created or you can again use 3rd party authentication providers like -

Amazon
Google
Facebook etc

Authentication flow is as -

Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/authentication-flow.html

So to summarize if you want to build a user directory with sign-in / sign-up functionality Cognito user pool is the way to go and if you just want access to AWS services without worrying about maintaining user database of your own you can use Cognito identity pool.

Thursday, 24 May 2018

How to check an active internet connection on iPhone/iOS

Background

There are various network calls that we may have to make from your device to server. Internet network connection may not always be available for review. So it is better if we can check if the network is reachable before making the API calls. In this post, we will see the same in Objective C.

How to check an active internet connection on iPhone/iOS

First, add SystemConfiguration framework to your project.
To do this double click on your project. This should open your project settings. Select your app target.

Now go to "Build Phases" Tab on the top
Now Expand "Link Binary With Libraries"
Now click on '+' icon and search for "SystemConfiguration"
You should see "SystemConfiguration.framework"
Select it and click Add
You should see it would be added under "Link Binary With Libraries"

You should also start seeing "Framework" group under project navigator -

Now add Tony Million's version of Reachability.h and Reachability.m to the project. You can find it here - https://github.com/tonymillion/Reachability
I have just created a new group called Reachability and added these file in it.

In the file where you want to make this change import Reachability

#import "Reachability.h"

Now you can check if the internet is available with following code snippet -

    if ([[Reachability reachabilityForInternetConnection]currentReachabilityStatus]==NotReachable)
    {
        //connection unavailable
        NSLog(@"Connection is not available");
    }
    else
    {
        //connection available
         NSLog(@"Connection is available");
    }

NOTE : #import <SystemConfiguration/SystemConfiguration.h> is inside Reachability.h. You do not have to explicitly import it anywhere. Just add it to the framework.

Tuesday, 22 May 2018

How to upload files to S3 from iOS app written in Objective C using AWS Cognito identity pool

Background

This post assumes you have setup Cognito identity pool as explained in the previous post -

How to setup Cognito Identity Pool for unauthenticated or authenticated access to AWS resources like S3

If not, then please refer the previous post and set that up. Before starting with using this you should have -

Identity pool ID
AWS region where pool and S3 bucket reside
S3 bucket name

We will use above in configuration and implementation that follows.

How to upload files to S3 from iOS app written in Objective C using AWS Cognito identity pool

First, go to your pod file and update following dependencies -

# Uncomment the next line to define a global platform for your project
# platform :ios, '9.0'


target 'TestApp' do
  # Uncomment the next line if you're using Swift or would like to use dynamic frameworks
  # use_frameworks!
  # Pods for TestApp


pod 'AWSMobileClient', '~> 2.6.18'  # For AWSMobileClient
pod 'AWSS3', '~> 2.6.18'            # For file transfers
pod 'AWSCognito', '~> 2.6.18'       # For data sync

end

Next run "Run pod install --repo-update" from the command line
Once you have the dependencies installed we can now write Objective C code to upload a file to S3.

//
//  FileUploader.m
//  TestApp
//
//  Created by Aniket on 22/05/18.
//


#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>


#import "FileUploader.h"
#import <AWSS3/AWSS3.h>
#import <AWSCore/AWSCore.h>




@implementation FileUploader


static AWSS3TransferManager *transferManager;


+ (void) initialize {
    
    if (self == [FileUploader class]) {
        AWSCognitoCredentialsProvider *credentialsProvider = [[AWSCognitoCredentialsProvider alloc] initWithRegionType:AWSRegionUSEast1 identityPoolId:@"us-east-1:f847843f-0162-43c2-b73f-efdc7c69cce2"];
        AWSServiceConfiguration *configuration = [[AWSServiceConfiguration alloc] initWithRegion:AWSRegionUSEast1 credentialsProvider:credentialsProvider];
        [AWSS3TransferManager registerS3TransferManagerWithConfiguration:[[AWSServiceConfiguration alloc] initWithRegion:AWSRegionUSEast1 credentialsProvider:credentialsProvider] forKey:s3TransferManagerKey];


        AWSServiceManager.defaultServiceManager.defaultServiceConfiguration = configuration;
                                        
        transferManager = [AWSS3TransferManager S3TransferManagerForKey:s3TransferManagerKey];
    }
    
}


+ (void)uploadFile
{
    
    
    NSURL *uploadingFileURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath: @"PATH_TO_FILE";
    AWSS3TransferManagerUploadRequest *uploadRequest = [AWSS3TransferManagerUploadRequest new];
    
    
    uploadRequest.bucket = s3Bucket;
    int timestamp = [[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970];
    uploadRequest.key = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@-%d%@",@"testfile",timestamp,@".txt"];
    uploadRequest.body = uploadingFileURL;
    
    [[transferManager upload:uploadRequest] continueWithExecutor:[AWSExecutor mainThreadExecutor]
                                                       withBlock:^id(AWSTask *task) {
                                                           if (task.error) {
                                                               if ([task.error.domain isEqualToString:AWSS3TransferManagerErrorDomain]) {
                                                                   switch (task.error.code) {
                                                                       case AWSS3TransferManagerErrorCancelled:
                                                                       case AWSS3TransferManagerErrorPaused:
                                                                           break;
                                                                           
                                                                       default:
                                                                           NSLog(@"Error uploading file to S3: %@", task.error);
                                                                           break;
                                                                   }
                                                               } else {
                                                                   // Unknown error.
                                                                   NSLog(@"Error uploading file to S3: %@", task.error);
                                                               }
                                                           }
                                                           
                                                           if (task.result) {
                                                               AWSS3TransferManagerUploadOutput *uploadOutput = task.result;
                                                               // The file uploaded successfully.
                                                               NSLog(@"uploading file to S3 was successful: %@", uploadOutput);
                                                           }
                                                           return nil;
                                                       }];
    
}
@end

In above code replace the identity pool id and region as per your configuration settings. This is Objective C code, if you want to see Swift or Android - Java please refer https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-mobile/latest/developerguide/how-to-integrate-an-existing-bucket.html

How to setup Cognito Identity Pool for unauthenticated or authenticated access to AWS resources like S3

Background

Many time when you are creating application be it mobile or web you have to provide an authentication mechanism for users to sign in before they can use your apps or websites features. AWS Cognito service does the same thing.

Amazon Cognito makes it easy for you to have users sign up and sign in to your apps, federate identities from social identity providers, secure access to AWS resources and synchronize data across multiple devices, platforms, and applications.

You can do 3 things using this service -

With Cognito Your User Pools, you can easily and securely add sign-up and sign-in functionality to your mobile and web apps with a fully-managed service that scales to support hundreds of millions of users.
With Cognito Federated Identities, your users can sign-in through social identity providers such as Facebook and Twitter, or through your own identity solution, and you can control access to AWS resources from your app.
With Cognito Sync, your app can save user data, such as preferences and game state, and sync that data to make your users' experiences consistent across their devices and when they are disconnected.

NOTE: AWS Cognito is a region-specific service so you have to select a region and make sure this service is available in that region. For this post, I am going to use us-east-1(N.Virginia).

Also in this post, I am going to show how we can create a federated identity pool which can be used to authenticate and access AWS resources. Though I am going to limit this post to setting-up the identity pool and corresponding AWS changes we will see how we can use this to upload sample files to Amazon S3 bucket.

How to setup Cognito Identity Pool for unauthenticated or authenticated access to AWS resources

Sign into AWS console and go to Cognito service.

Now click on "Manage Federated Identities"
Provide a name for your identity pool. Eg. athakur_test
If you want unauthenticated users to use this pool for authenticating and accessing AWS resources select "Enable access to unauthenticated identities". I am going to select this since finally, I want to use this pool to upload files to S3.

NOTE: Amazon Cognito can support unauthenticated identities by providing a unique identifier and AWS credentials for users who do not authenticate with an identity provider. If your application allows customers to use the application without logging in, you can enable access to unauthenticated identities.

If you want to provide access to authenticated users only then use one of the Authentication providers like Facebook, Amazon, Google etc
Click on "create pool".

Next screen you should see the roles that AWS will create for you. You can select "View details" to see the role details.
Finally, click "Allow"

NOTE1: Assigning a role to your application end users helps you restrict access to your AWS resources. Amazon Cognito integrates with Identity and Access Management (IAM) and lets you select specific roles for both your authenticated and unauthenticated identities.

NOTE2: By default, Amazon Cognito creates a new role with limited permissions - end users only have access to Cognito Sync and Mobile Analytics. You can modify the roles if your application needs access to other AWS resources, such as S3 or DynamoDB.

You can see click on video details to see this default policy document -

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "mobileanalytics:PutEvents",
        "cognito-sync:*"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "*"
      ]
    }
  ]

}

We will see how to attach additional permissions to this role later.

As you can see 2 roles are created - one for the authenticated user and other for the unauthenticated user -

Cognito_athakur_testAuth_Role
Cognito_athakur_testUnauth_Role

On the next page, you should see some sample code - one for getting credentials and other for Cognito sync -

Get AWS credentials :

// Initialize the Amazon Cognito credentials provider
CognitoCachingCredentialsProvider credentialsProvider = new CognitoCachingCredentialsProvider(
    getApplicationContext(),
    "us-east-1:f847843f-0162-43c2-b73f-efdc7c69cce2", // Identity pool ID
    Regions.US_EAST_1 // Region
);

Store User Data:

// Initialize the Cognito Sync client
CognitoSyncManager syncClient = new CognitoSyncManager(
   getApplicationContext(),
   Regions.US_EAST_1, // Region
   credentialsProvider);

// Create a record in a dataset and synchronize with the server
Dataset dataset = syncClient.openOrCreateDataset("myDataset");
dataset.put("myKey", "myValue");
dataset.synchronize(new DefaultSyncCallback() {
    @Override
    public void onSuccess(Dataset dataset, List newRecords) {
  //Your handler code here
    }
});

Note down the Identity pool id and region . In my case identity pool id is "us-east-1:f847843f-0162-43c2-b73f-efdc7c69cce2" and region is us-east-1. We will need it in subsequent setup.

The last part that is remaining now is to add additional permissions to our new role so that Cognito pool users can access other required AWS services - in this case since we need to upload files to S3 we just need S3 put access.

NOTE: Make sure Cognito identity pool should be created in same region as S3 bucket.

So go to IAM and go to roles and select it. Now click add inline policy and add following JSON policy -

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "Stmt1526901559336",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject"
            ],
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::<BUCKET_NAME>/*"
        }
    ]
}

You have to replace <BUCKET_NAME> with your actual S3 bucket name. Always make IAM policies as stricter as possible. In this case, we are just giving put object permission on the desired S3 bucket only.

NOTE: This was for upload to S3 bucket but you can provide access to other services that you desire. If you need to create the policy you can use policy generator AWS provides - https://awspolicygen.s3.amazonaws.com/policygen.html

At this point, your Cognito service is all set up for implementation. In the next post, we will see how we can use this to implement it in our mobile or web application.

Saturday, 19 May 2018

How to get the current time in milliseconds

Background

In many scenarios, we need the current time in milliseconds. In this post, we will see various methods to get the time in milliseconds since the UNIX epoch (January 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC) in various programming languages.

How to get the current time in milliseconds

Following are ways you can get current time in milliseconds for various programming languages -

ActionScript

(new Date()).time

std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::milliseconds>(std::chrono::system_clock::now().time_since_epoch()).count()

C#.NET

DateTimeOffset.UtcNow.ToUnixTimeMilliseconds()

Clojure

(System/currentTimeMillis)

Excel / Google Sheets*

= (NOW() - CELL_WITH_TIMEZONE_OFFSET_IN_HOURS/24 - DATE(1970,1,1)) * 86400000

Go / Golang

time.Now().UnixNano() / 1000000

Hive*

unix_timestamp() * 1000

Java / Groovy / Kotlin

System.currentTimeMillis()

Javascript

new Date().getTime()

MySQL*

UNIX_TIMESTAMP() * 1000

Objective-C

(long long)([[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970] * 1000.0)

OCaml

(1000.0 *. Unix.gettimeofday ())

Oracle PL/SQL*

SELECT (SYSDATE - TO_DATE('01-01-1970 00:00:00', 'DD-MM-YYYY HH24:MI:SS')) * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000 FROM DUAL

Perl

use Time::HiRes qw(gettimeofday); print gettimeofday;

round(microtime(true) * 1000)

PostgreSQL

extract(epoch FROM now()) * 1000Python int(round(time.time() * 1000))

QDateTime::currentMSecsSinceEpoch()

as.numeric(Sys.time()) * 1000

Ruby

(Time.now.to_f * 1000).floor

Scala

val timestamp: Long = System.currentTimeMillis

SQL Server

DATEDIFF(ms, '1970-01-01 00:00:00', GETUTCDATE())

SQLite*

STRFTIME('%s', 'now') * 1000

Swift*

let currentTime = NSDate().timeIntervalSince1970 * 1000

VBScript / ASP

offsetInMillis = 60000 * GetTimeZoneOffset()

WScript.Echo

DateDiff("s", "01/01/1970 00:00:00", Now()) * 1000 - offsetInMillis + Timer * 1000 mod 1000

Source: https://currentmillis.com/

I recently investigated this as I wanted MicrosoftDateFormat in objective C. We can do this as follows -

NSString *date = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"/Date(%lld)/",(long long)([currentTag.firstSeenTime timeIntervalSince1970] * 1000.0)];

NOTE: timeIntervalSince1970 gives you the number of seconds whereas Newtonsoft.Json library (C#) gives it in milliseconds so you need multiple by 1000.0 to get milliseconds.

Friday, 11 May 2018

How to enable touch to click on your Mac

Background

If you are a Mac user then you must be familiar with the peculiar trackpad gestures and usage Mac offers. Personally, I feel touch to click is a much better option then physically pressing the trackpad. In this post, I will show you how to do the same. I am using MacBook Pro running Sierra (10.13.4).

How to enable touch to click on your Mac

Go to "Preferences" and select "Trackpad"
Under "Point and Click" select "Tap to Click"

Notice how "Click with two fingers" is also changed to "Click or tab with two finders" for secondary click.
You can use this checkbox to enable or disable "Tap to click"

How to enable touch to click on your Mac with command line

You can do the same above setting with the command line. Execute following commands in your Terminal.

sudo defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.trackpad Clicking -bool true
sudo defaults -currentHost write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.mouse.tapBehavior -int 1
sudo defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.mouse.tapBehavior -int 1

NOTE: You will need to reboot your system for changes to take effect.

Similarly, to disable you can do

sudo defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.trackpad Clicking -bool false
sudo defaults -currentHost write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.mouse.tapBehavior -int 0
sudo defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.mouse.tapBehavior -int 0

Again reboot your machine to take effect.

Friday, 25 May 2018

Understanding difference between Cognito User Pool vs Identity Pool

Background

Amazon Cognito User Pools

Amazon Cognito Identity Pools (Federated Identities)

Understanding the difference between Cognito User Pool vs Identity Pool

Related Links

Thursday, 24 May 2018

How to check an active internet connection on iPhone/iOS

Background

How to check an active internet connection on iPhone/iOS

Related Links

Tuesday, 22 May 2018

How to upload files to S3 from iOS app written in Objective C using AWS Cognito identity pool

Background

How to upload files to S3 from iOS app written in Objective C using AWS Cognito identity pool

Related Links

How to setup Cognito Identity Pool for unauthenticated or authenticated access to AWS resources like S3

Background

How to setup Cognito Identity Pool for unauthenticated or authenticated access to AWS resources

Related Links

Saturday, 19 May 2018

How to get the current time in milliseconds

Background

How to get the current time in milliseconds

Related Links

Friday, 11 May 2018

How to enable touch to click on your Mac

Background

How to enable touch to click on your Mac

How to enable touch to click on your Mac with command line

Related Links