Question

I have a Rails application where a user longs in and I have the user_id in the session. The next step is to create a scope for all model data shown to the user where data.user_id = session[:user_id].

I know I can do the following in each of my controllers

Controller.find_all_by_user_id(session[:user_id])

Yet to me it seems there is probably a better solution. I found the possibility to add a scope to the model, yet the session is not known here and MVC pattern wise it is probably not a good idea to have it there. Is there a solution to apply such a user_id restriction to all data coming from the models or should I just use the find_all_by_user_id for every controller function that has userdata in it?

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly you want to access some data by user_id. Which means that you can define relationship in the user model as has_many :this_and_that or something like that. It it is right, then you can create a before_filter or even better a function in your application controller in which you get your current user instance. Trough this instance, you can access all available data to that user. You can even make that function a helper function, and you can use that in a view.

#User.erb
has_many :other_data

#ApplicationConroller.erb
def current_user
  @current_user ||= User.find_by_id(session[:user_id])
end

#OtherControllers
def index
  @other_datas = current_user.other_datas
end