Question

I am using Devise for authentication in my website.
I want the user be able to post in the text area if he/she is signed in, if not he’ll type what he wants to post in the textarea and when he click on post it pops up a sign-in dialog where user sign-in/sign-up and then it automatically post his comment in the text area to the website.

I’m not sure if I’m using the right logic, but I have the post button to post the comment if user signed-in, otherwise do nothing and javascript opens up the login-dialog. The login/sing-up works but I figure out how to post the message automatically after that.

This is my code for the button:

 <% if user_signed_in? %>
    <%= f.submit :value => t(:submit_comment_text), :class => "submit-button" %>
 <% else %>
    <input class="submit-button" id="comment_submit_nlogged"  value="Post!"/>
 <% end %>

The first part works fine, but the second part the dialog opens up and the user sign in, but it refreshes the page and I loose whatever user typed in the text-area.
I tried to get the content of the text-area through the params variable, but when devise gets called the params for text area goes away and they get replaced by devise params.

Any idea how I can get this working?

Answer 1

You can save the text area in a session variable like

• pass the value in the params when the user signs in/signs up
• in the controller, save it in a session variable( session[:text_area] = params[:text_area]
• then after sign in or sign up, you will be redirected to the comment page and you can
  repopulate the @comment object in the controller method using session[:text_area] and remove it.

You can read about Rails Sessions here
There can also use cookies(if the textarea content is small) or HTML localStorage( if your browser supports it)