Question

Hi clever programmers,

I’ve been searching and reading a couple days, but I need some Rails help-

Here is my goal: I want to make a multi-page profile for each user, and I’d like to handle this profile with a profile controller.

The problem? How do I make the ‘show’ REST action apply to an entire controller instead of just one page? Specifically, how can I have both a @current_user and a @user variable available in the Profile controller that correspond to the signed-in user and the current user’s page.

I’m not sure if I should be making routes with multiple :id s in the route or if there is some way to persist the signed-in-user in something like @current_user when they sign in that is just available everywhere and then I would use the :id of the user who’s profile it is in the route. I’m pretty sure facebook does something like facebook.com/{your_id}/{their_id}/ for example.

I tried accessing @current_user from my session_helper.rb class but it came up nil and I’m not sure how to pass the :id to use User.find(params[:id]) because the profile controller is not affiliated with the resource for the User model.

Any protips or links to helpful readings would be much appreciated. I’m a beginner so feel free to suggest a better course of action if I’m going against the rails way. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You may not know but you can store session data, and user_id it’s really common thing that people saves on it.

So for saving at the sign in

session[user_id] = ....

Then you could have something like this on a helper
def current_user
User.find(session[user_id]) if session[user_id]
end

You should check the gem called devise. It provides all the functionality for aunthentication and it also provides a current_user method everywhere. You should check it at least to see how they have implemented that method.