Question

Disclaimer: super new to rails. I’m using Rails 3.2

Anyways, I’m trying to create a form for Merchants to sign in. I have a MerchantSessionsController that tries to create a new session based on signin form input:

This is what I have in my
app/views/merchant_sessions/new.html.erb

<%= form_for(:merchant_session, :url => merchant_sessions_path) do |f| %>
  <div class="field">
    <%= f.label :userName %><br />
    <%= f.text_field :userName %>
  </div>
  <div class="field">
    <%= f.label :password %><br />
    <%= f.password_field :password %>
  </div>
  <div class="actions">
    <%= f.submit "Sign in" %>
  </div>
<% end %>

The file app\controllers\merchant_sessions_controller.rb contains:

def create
    merchant = Merchant.find_by_userName(params[:userName])

    if merchant && merchant.authenticate(params[:password])
        merchant_session[:merchant_id] = merchant.id
        redirect_to root_url, :notice => "Merchanthas been logged in"
    else
        flash.now[:error] = "Invalid username or password."
        @title  = "Merchant Signin"
        render "new"
    end
end

Unfortunately, the params[:userName] and params[:password] keep getting passed as nil, even though on the debug output on the merchants signin page, I see that the userName and password are definitely being passed in.

--- !ruby/hash:ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess
utf8: ✓
authenticity_token: 8WsOviJyY1kktPq9dDO+OFePdSKf2uGLY3Pnc4bU2tc=
merchant_session: !ruby/hash:ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess
  userName: asd
  password: ddsad
commit: Sign in
action: create
controller: merchant_sessions

I’ve also attempted to access the params[:action] parameter, which worked fine. Why is it that the userName and password parameters are nil? I had changed the name of the MerchantSessionsController (formerly just SessionsController), but I don’t think that should be the problem

Answer 1

You’re looking in the wrong place for the username and password, note the specific structure of your YAML dump:

merchant_session: !ruby/hash:ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess
  userName: asd
  password: ddsad

and your form:

<%= form_for(:merchant_session, :url => merchant_sessions_path) do |f| %>

You want to look at params[:merchant_session][:userName] and params[:merchant_session][:password] instead of params[:userName] and params[:password]:

def create
    mparams  = params[:merchant_session]
    merchant = Merchant.find_by_userName(mparams[:userName])

    if merchant && merchant.authenticate(mparams[:password])
        #...