Question

I have a database-less rails app which communicates with an API.

For authentication, I send the users credentials to the api and receive a session token if successful. Subsequently, every api request I make should contain that token.

api_request.rb:

class ApiRequest

  def initialize(relative_path,params={})
    params = _add_base_data params
    send_request relative_path, params
  end

  private
  def send_request(relative_path,params)
    conn = Faraday.new(:url => MyApp::Application.config.server) do |faraday|
      faraday.request  :url_encoded
      faraday.response :logger
      faraday.adapter  Faraday.default_adapter
    end

    encoded = conn.post relative_path,params
    @data = JSON.parse encoded.body
    @data
  end

  def _add_base_data params
    params[:session_token] = ?
    params
  end
end

my_session.rb:

class MySession
   def login? email,pass
      params = { :email => email, :password => pass }
      resp = ApiRequest.new '/user/login', params 
      if resp.failed?
        false
      else
        @session[:token] = resp.data['session_token']
        true
      end
    end
end

How can I make the session token available to the ApiRequest model for every call?

Answer 1

How about passing the session token as an argument to the ApiRequest instead? You could then wrap calls up in a simple method for use in your controllers:

# in base controller class
def api(resource, params)
  ApiRequest.new @session[:token], '/user/login', params 
end

This has the advantage that session parameters are kept at the controller level, eliminating the need to persist state information in your model (where it probably shouldn’t be).