What is aura.redirect?

Question

I'm looking at one of the custom login controllers for communities and noticed this:

@AuraEnabled
public static String login(String username, String password, String startUrl) {

    try{
        ApexPages.PageReference lgn = Site.login(username, password, startUrl);
        aura.redirect(lgn);
        return null;
    }
    catch (Exception ex) {
        system.debug('error message ' + ex.getMessage());
        return ex.getMessage();  
    }
}

Basically, the user will enter in a username and password, and after they click "login" they will be redirected to the start url. Is there any documentation around aura.redirect?

Answer 1

No documentation can be found in Salesforce but it just works. The other issue I found is that for some reason test classes don't work well with them. Hence I include code like

if(!Test.isRunningTest()) { aura.redirect(lgn); }

so that I doesn't affect the test class and code coverage.

Answer 2

Ultimately moved away from aura.redirect and used window.location.href to sent the new endpoint. Once the apex controller finished, the callback function in the component redirected the user accordingly.