Previously I have written about making your code neater by using TypeScript paths. Since then I have found that the NextJs create app Wizzard now asks you about setting this, so that from the get-go you will now likely start with it set in an application and have neater code for the better.

However, if you then try using Storybook then you're likely to see an error Module not found: Error: Can't resolve '@/components...' on any component that has an import using one of the paths.

Quite simply, Storybook does not pick up the setting in your tsconfig.json file and it has no idea where to import the module from.

To get around this issue we need to also tell Storybook about the paths we've set in .storybook\main.ts. We do this by adding a resolve alias to the config returned by webpackFinal. The code example here sets an alias that will match the default path set by NextJs in its create app wizzard.

Of course if you have other paths set then you can add them here as well. When you next run storybook the error should be gone and your components now show in Storybooks UI.

With Auth0 you can set up a completely SAAS-based Authentication and Authorization provider, freeing you of any worries surrounding losing passwords, implementing the latest authentication best practices and a whole heap of other things.

One thing that tripped me up with it, however, was checking what permissions have been assigned to my users.

In my setup, I was using a .NET Core Web API hosted in Azure and a React SPA hosted separately. My API would need to check the permissions assigned to my users in order to check they could perform actions such as updating another user, and my React front end would need to show and hide various pieces of functionality to match.

Checking Permissions in the .NET Core Web API

This article isn't about permissions in APIs but it's important to understand how this differs too what's needed in the React front end.

The tutorial ASP.NET Core Web API v2.1: authoization is relatively straightforward to follow and at the end, you will have an API that performs Authorization with a user's permissions.

Permissions in Auth0 are assigned to users via roles. i.e. A user gets assigned a role and roles have related permissions. This way we can design our application around granular permissions and the roles which give those permissions to a user can be configured separately.

The permissions are provided to the API within the user's authentication token, however for this to work they actually have to be in the token to start with. By default roles and permissions are not included in a token.

These can be included by setting the scope property when calling getAccessTokenSilently (the function to get a token) in React.

Alternatively, you can Enable Role-Based Access Control for APIs. This will increase the size of your token by including all permissions assigned to the person, but removes the need to request them.

Checking Permissions in React

It's likely that before calling an API you will want your React logic to check the users permissions. After all, it wouldn't be a great user experience if they're allowed to perform actions which result in permission errors.

As well as the getAccessTokenSilently the useAuth0 React Hook contains a property for the user and getIdTokenClaims. When using these you will be able to see the details associated with the logged in user. e.g. Name. However unlike getAccessTokenSilently, it doesn't matter what you include in the scope or if you've enabled role-based access control, the properties will not include what permissions or roles are assigned to the user.

To include them you must setup a login action to add them to the token. See Add user roles to ID and Access tokens in Auth0's documentation.

This will direct you to create a login flow where you add a custom action containing the following.

Note, the namespace part is so that what you add to the token is unique and doesn't clash with anything Auth0 is adding.

You can now follow these examples to perform a claims checks on the user. E.g.

This as you may have spotted is only assigning a role to the token rather than actual permissions. In my case, this was enough, however, this is one area I think the react hook is severely lacking.

Writing custom logic to set a users permissions into the set of claims feels highly wrong, but after some back and forth with Auth0's support team, for now though this appears to be the only option.

Although JavaScript is single-threaded, it is relatively simple to avoid blocking the thread by writing code in an asynchronous style through the use of functions with an async keyword that returns a promise and only awaiting when you need it.

For example, the following code contains an API call in an async function.

If we wanted to call two APIs then we could do the following.

However because both API calls are being immediately awaited, this will result in the execution of the function stopping while it waits for the result of the first API call before making the second.

As we don't need that response to make the second API call, we can improve the performance of the code by moving the await keywords to the point we actually need the responses. Both API calls will now be made in parallel rather than the second waiting for the first to finish.

Call an API for each item in an array in parallel

Those initial examples were quite easy to understand, but what if we have a scenario where you get a list of films showing at the cinema on a particular day and display the show times for each? You have two APIs at your disposal; The first returns all the films and the second returns the showtimes for a given film.

To get all the data you need you first need to call the API to get the films and then loop through them to call the second API and get the show times.

The problem with this code though is that its execution length will be the films API call response time + (showtime API response time * the number of films).

As each call to the second API have no dependencies on each other, it doesn't make any sense for them to have to be performed sequentially in the loop.

Instead, we can refactor for loop to be a map calling an async function which returns the new array and make use of Promise.all() to ensure they have all completed before returning the results.

The API calls for show times will now app be made in parallel reducing the overall execution time of the code.

With Netlify it's quite easy to quickly spin up a new website with a lot of good default out the box, but there's a few options that are good to set for both security and seo reasons.

Firstly it's good practice to have some headers set to improve security. For example setting X-Content-Type-Options to nosniff will disable sniffing of mime types. Setting X-Frame-Options to DENY will prevent the website being rendered in a frame on another site and Referrer-Policy of same-origin will reduce the amount of referrer information sent to other websites.

It's also a good idea to setup a redirect on the Netlify subdomain that Netlify will have created for your site. If you don't, then you could find the wrong URL ending up in Google.