“Understanding the ‘login_required’ Decorator in Flask: Ensuring Route Authorization

[Rajeev Bagra]

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Certainly! Let’s break down the provided code step by step:

1. Purpose:

– The purpose of this code snippet is to define a decorator called login_required that can be applied to Flask routes to ensure that only logged-in users can access those routes.

1. Decorator Definition:

– The decorator login_required is defined as a function that takes another function f as its argument.
– This means that login_required can be used to decorate (modify the behavior of) other functions.

1. Decorator Implementation:

– Inside the login_required decorator, a new function named decorated_function is defined.
– This decorated_function will wrap around the original function that the login_required decorator is applied to.

1. Preserving Metadata:

– The @wraps(f) decorator is used to ensure that the metadata (such as the name, docstring, etc.) of the original function f is preserved in the decorated_function.
– This is important because without @wraps(f), the decorated_function would lose the metadata of f, which could lead to confusion during debugging or introspection.

1. Authorization Check:

– Inside decorated_function, there’s an authorization check to determine if the user is logged in.
– It checks if the “user_id” key is present in the session. If it’s not, it redirects the user to the “/login” route.
– The session object is a special dictionary provided by Flask that stores user-specific information across requests.

1. Calling the Original Function:

– If the user is logged in (i.e., if the “user_id” key is present in the session), decorated_function calls the original function f with the provided arguments (*args and **kwargs).
– This allows the original function to execute normally if the user is authorized.

1. Return:

– Finally, decorated_function is returned from the login_required decorator. This means that when login_required is used as a decorator, it replaces the original function with decorated_function, effectively adding the login requirement check to the route.

In summary, this code defines a decorator login_required that, when applied to Flask routes, ensures that only logged-in users can access those routes. It does this by wrapping the original route function with another function (decorated_function) that performs an authorization check before allowing the original function to execute.

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