Comments on: Making Session Data Available to Models in Ruby on Rails

By: Jason FB

Jason FB — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:12:07 +0000

This is the best post I’ve found about this issue — a hotly debated topic. Just implemented this for the app I’m working on and we found this solution to be the one we went with. It maintains abstraction while gets the job done.

One thing to note, in your ApplicationController you don’t need to include UserInfo:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
include UserInfo

The include statement is unnecessary and in fact will get in the way if you have another kind of authentication system (authlogic, restful-authentication) which is going to define a current_user method at the Controller level too.

So I just took it out there (it is still necessary in the model of course).

(Since UserInfo.current_user is setting a class variable, all you need is the module loaded, not to mix it into your controller.)

If anyone sees a problem with this approach let me know.

By: Braxton Beyer

Braxton Beyer — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:53:20 +0000

Could you achieve this same thing using Rails.cache? (http://www.highdots.com/forums/ruby-rails-talk/best-way-store-global-variable-285504.html)

What are the pros/cons of each method?

By: yuanping

yuanping — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:23:13 +0000

Thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for

By: Prakash Teli

Prakash Teli — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:46:28 +0000

Thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for. I tried using global variables first that was a bad idea. This is a much cleaner solution.

By: Ivar Vasara

Ivar Vasara — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:03:06 +0000

Alternatively, a good working example of using ActionController::Caching::Sweeper is the user_stamp plugin.

By: Cristian Livadaru

Cristian Livadaru — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:36:39 +0000

what about using attr_accessor ?
for example:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessor :change_user
  #..
end

then you can access the data in the controller and assign the value from the session.

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:32:18 +0000

This is pretty nice. Solves an interesting problem. Just took a few minutes to wire it in. Thanks!

By: Alejandro

Alejandro — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:56:02 +0000

Hi, nice post!
Do you know if this works with FastCGI?
I tried it with WEBrick and it works, but in production I have FastCGI and I couldn’t confirm it uses one thread per request.
Thanks!

By: magnum blog » Blog Archive » links for 2009-01-20

magnum blog » Blog Archive » links for 2009-01-20 — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:00:13 +0000

[...] Making Session Data Available to Models in Ruby on Rails | Zorched / One Line Fix include UserInfo (tags: programming tutorial rails rubyonrails ruby security ror mongrel session sessions) [...]

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:41:14 +0000

Does anyone know whether Thread.current works with Passenger?