Question

I am using Devise with Ruby on Rails. I have a few pages that I am using with a different mime-type – say /myapp/products.test … so I have registered a mime-type called ‘test’ and it resembles text/html … and I have content negotiation to either display the html.erb template or the test.erb template …

Now – when I have an authenticate_user! method in my controller – and I am using the ‘test’ mime-type – I don’t properly get redirected – I don’t get redirected at all – I just get a “You need to log in or sign up before continuing.” message.

What in Devise needs to overridden, so that it redirects when I use a mime-type other than html?

Answer 1

I found part of the answer on the following wiki page: https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/wiki/How-To:-Make-Devise-work-with-other-formats-like-mobile,-iphone-and-ipad-(Rails-specific)

So – in summary (besides registering the mime type etc as explained in the question):

In the config/initializers/devise.rb file, uncomment the config.navigational_formats line and replace with:

config.navigational_formats = [:"*/*", "*/*", :html, :test]

Add a file to the initializers, and add the following to it:

ActionController::Responder.class_eval do
  alias :to_test :to_html
end

I also needed to override a devise method because my mime type actually responds to html too – but I do want to see whether it also responds to :test. So again in the initializers folder, add a file that contains the following:

module Devise
  module Controllers
    # Helpers used in both FailureApp and Devise controllers.
    module SharedHelpers

      protected

      # Helper used by FailureApp and Devise controllers to retrieve proper formats.
      def request_format
        @request_format ||= if request.format.test?
          :test
        elsif request.format.respond_to?(:ref)
          request.format.ref
        elsif MIME_REFERENCES
          request.format
        elsif request.format # Rails < 3.0.4
          request.format.to_sym
        end
      end

    end
  end
end

It may be that it would have been cleaner – instead of overriding the above method – to override a method in Warden that does the redirect to the unauthorized url – but I couldn’t quite figure it out, and also uncertain whether Devise (upstream) isn’t the better place to override methods.