I've been reading up on token based authentication for a project that's part of my trainee-ship. My task is to implement some sort of user authentication and we've settled on token based authentication.
Now I get the basic principles, like passing the token in the xhr header for xhr requests. But I do not understand how you would pass the token on an initial page call.
Let's say we're working on a single page application with a navigation bar that has a login button for users that are not currently logged in, and a profile button for users that are logged in.
Seeing as that navigation bar is delivered on the initial call of the website, how do I know how to serve the right button to the user? From what I can gather I can pretty much only authenticate on xhr.
Do I have a misunderstanding about token based authentication?
A little clarification: Assume a User already is logged in and has received a token from the Server. He then closes the Tab and later goes to my app again. At this point, server-side I do not know the user, as I could not have sent the token at the initial request.
A coworker suggested using AngularJS' onload to send the token after the initial page load to verify and get my JSON data from the server, which is then used to create the app with Angular
Also the point of the project is to not use an existing library like JWT, so I can actually grasp the concept and the inner workings of such mechanisms.
