ctools modal form shows ugly access denied

Question

I have made a modal form using ctools. The form works okay when the user has access rights, but with no access rights an empty modal form is showing and I get a browser error saying

"An AJAX HTTP error occurred. HTTP Result Code 403" (and a lot of debugging information)

Is this a flaw in ctools modal or am I missing something?

In case of access denied I would like to fall back to a standard access denied message.

Answer 1

I will try to answer this myself. There is no mentioning of this issue in the CTools project itself but the issue is mentioned at the CTools Auto-modal project https://drupal.org/node/1450232

There is also a solution:

• implement hook_page_delivery_callback_alter
• check if callback is made by one of your ajax links
• if so, check is user has access by using menu_get_item and inspecting the resulting router item
• if access is ok, do nothing
• if access denied or page not found, render a message

The solution at CTools Auto-modal renders the message in the CTools modal box. But I preferred to kill the CTools modal and just do nothing:

$commands[] = ctools_modal_command_dismiss();
print ajax_render($commands);
exit();

This way the dreaded drupal ajax error will never appear.