Question

I have the following helper methods in the application_controller.rb for authlogic:

def current_user_session
  return @current_user_session if defined?(@current_user_session)
  @current_user_session = UserSession.find
end

def current_user
  return @current_user if defined?(@current_user)
  @current_user = current_user_session && current_user_session.record
end

I do not understand how the current_user_session method – specifically, how UserSession.find obtains the current user’s session. I also do not understand what it is doing with find, where no argument is given.

Answer 1

It doesn’t need to pass it an argument since it uses a unique session ID whose functionality is built into Rails. Check out the authlogic documentation for the find method for more information on it. It’s not the same thing as an Active Record class, where find queries the database for a specific primary key.