redirect_to in __before__ leads to 404

[Christoph Haas]

Dear list,

I'm rolling my own simple authentication which has always worked like that
in several other Pylons projects (see
http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonscookbook/Simple+Homegrown+Authentication)
by adding a conditional redirection in the BaseController's __before__ method:

================================================
class BaseController(WSGIController):
    def __before__(self):
        controller = \
             request.environ['pylons.routes_dict'].get('controller')

        # Enforce authentication
        # (unless we are in the /login controller
        # or else we would get a redirection loop)
        # Current logged in username is saved in session['admin']
        if not session.get('admin'):
            if controller != 'admin':
                redirect_to('/login')
================================================

This works well if I'm not logged in and try to reach a valid URL. I'll get
redirected to /login and see the login form. All is well.

However if I try to access an invalid URL which would usually lead to a 404
error (/some/weird/url) then something strange happens:

- a 404 response is sent
- content of the 404 response is a "302 Found ..." page with a
  Location header trying to redirect me to /login

So somehow the 404 handler seems to interfere with my attempt to redirect.
Can anybody tell me why this happens and if it can be worked around? I
wonder why this doesn't happen in my older 0.9.6 projects.

Thanks in advance.

Kindly
 Christoph

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