Why can I not access 'passport' fields in session store JSON? - json

Question

I've got a node application that uses express, socket.io 1.0 and passport. When a user auths through passport-twitter I store their information in a session store using the below code;
var passportSocketIo = require("passport.socketio");
var MemoryStore = express.session.MemoryStore
,sessionStore = new MemoryStore();
io.set('authorization', passportSocketIo.authorize({
cookieParser: express.cookieParser,
key: 'express.sid',
secret: 'secret',
store: sessionStore
}));
I then use the following for my socket.io connection handler;
io.on("connection", function(client){
console.log(sessionStore.sessions[client.request.sessionID]);
});
This returns all the session data for the client with that ID in this format;
{
"cookie": {
"originalMaxAge": null,
"expires": null,
"httpOnly": true,
"path": "/"
},
"passport": {
"user": {
"id": "XXXXXXXXXX",
[...],
[...]
}
}
}
The issue is that if I tried to access "passport" from the structure, the result is always undefined. I tried the following (both with and without the . before "passport");
sessionStore.sessions[client.request.sessionID].[passport]
sessionStore.sessions[client.request.sessionID].["passport"]
sessionStore.sessions[client.request.sessionID].passport
sessionStore.sessions[client.request.sessionID]."passport"
Unfortunately these return as undefined. I'm really just trying to get the passport.user.id field value out of that structure so I can perform some DB lookup (e.g. user group, user privacy settings, etc) and so I can ensure I emit the correct DB data back to the client.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

After looking into it further, it appears that passing it through JSON.parse() was the correct method to use;
var jsobj = JSON.parse(sessionStore.sessions[client.request.sessionID]);
console.log(jsobj.passport.user.id);
or for a single line solution;
console.log(JSON.parse(sessionStore.sessions[client.request.sessionID]).passport.user.id);