# Access a property of the dashboard within a Express Application

**URL:** <https://discourse.nodered.org/t/access-a-property-of-the-dashboard-within-a-express-application/1186>\
**Category:** Dashboard\
**Created:** [29 June 2018 11:55 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/access-a-property-of-the-dashboard-within-a-express-application/1186 "2018-06-29T11:55:49Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![shrickus](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex026/user_avatar/discourse.nodered.org/shrickus/32/517_2.png) [@shrickus](https://discourse.nodered.org/u/shrickus)\
**Post date:** [29 June 2018 13:23 UTC](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/access-a-property-of-the-dashboard-within-a-express-application/1186/6 "2018-06-29T13:23:26Z")

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As Nick says, the dashboard is a Single Page Application (SPA), and so it only renders the portion that corresponds to the page being shown. The only luck I’ve had with managing the page flow is by watching for output from a `ui_control` node, which sends a msg every time the page changes.

Although you can’t do actually “security” with it, you **can** redirect the user back to another page if you detect certain situations (missing context variable, for instance). You can see more examples and some cautions on [this discussion thread](https://discourse.nodered.org/t/orchestrating-dashboard-page-flow-via-ui-control/1103).

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