Question

I’m basically following https://github.com/mattconnolly/devise-custom-strategy-demo/blob/master/lib/my_authentication.rb

Everything works well, but there is one bug, if I’m a new user to my application (of course my user info is already in our central authentication server), I have to login twice for the first time to use the application

And my authenticate!:

def authenticate!

  # mapping comes from devise base class, "mapping.to" is the class of the model
  # being used for authentication, typically the class "User". This is set by using
  # the `devise` class method in that model
  klass = mapping.to

  # login credentials
  username  = params[:user][:email] # The username is the email field
  password  = params[:user][:password]

  begin
    # Here is the code to authenticate
    # Basically, we are sending the credentials to another central authentication server
    # If the authentication fails, it will throw an exception, which will be caught below to fail!

    user = klass.find_or_initialize_by_email(username)

    puts "user: #{user.inspect}"

    success! user
  rescue Exception => e
    failureMessage = "Auth error: #{e.inspect}"
    puts "#{failureMessage}"

    fail! failureMessage
  end

  # if we wanted to stop other strategies from authenticating the user
end

And in my User model:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Include default devise modules. Others available are:
  # :token_authenticatable, :encryptable, :confirmable, :lockable, :timeoutable and :omniauthable
  devise :my_authentication,
         :rememberable, :trackable

  # Setup accessible (or protected) attributes for your model
  attr_accessible :username, :first_name, :last_name, :remember_me, :email

end

As you can see that I’m not using database_authenticatable at all, but we need to save some user info from the central server to our application server.

I’m guessing it’s because of:

    user = klass.find_or_initialize_by_email(username)

    puts "user: #{user.inspect}"

    success! user

but I don’t know how to modify it, so that a new user does NOT have to login twice to use the application.

Answer 1

I just figured it out myself. Before success! user, add:

    if (user.new_record?)
      user.save
      puts "new user saved ******"
    end