Question

I am using devise omniauth in my rails application, here is the User class

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable,
         :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable, :omniauthable

  attr_accessible :email, :password, :password_confirmation, :remember_me, :encrypted_password, :fb_id

  def set_facebook_info(info)
    @facebook_info = info
  end

  def get_facebook_info
    @facebook_info
  end

  def self.find_for_facebook_oauth(access_token, signed_in_resource=nil)
    data = access_token.extra.raw_info
    if user = User.find_by_email(data.email)
      if not user.fb_id
        user.fb_id = access_token.uid
        user.save
      end
      user.set_facebook_info "whatever" <-- I tried here

      user
    else # Create a user with a stub password.
      user = User.create(:email => data.email, :password => Devise.friendly_token[0,20], :fb_id => access_token.uid)
      user
    end
  end

  def self.new_with_session(params, session)
    super.tap do |user|
          user.set_facebook_info "whatever" # <-- I Tried here too 
      if data = session["devise.facebook_data"] && session["devise.facebook_data"]["extra"]["user_hash"]
        user.email = data["email"]
      end
    end
  end
end

I want to use set and get methods for keeping some facebook user information. but when I use current_user in view, it gives me no value of what I’ve set in my User class.
like in application.html.erb :

<span><%= current_user.get_facebook_info %></span> 

returns an empty value

Does anybody has an idea about it ? It should be a common case. in general , how can we assign some non connected to DB attribute to current_user via devise ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Your @facebook_info attribute is only stored in memory, not persisted to the database. So on the next page load, Devise is going to load your model from the database again, and that is why the information is missing.

If you want to keep the Facebook info, you need to persist it to the database. Rails has some nice ways of storing hashes directly in a text column:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :preferences
end

user = User.create(:preferences => { "background" => "black", "display" => large })
User.find(user.id).preferences # => { "background" => "black", "display" => large }

Source: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html