Question

I’m having a bit of a noob issue. I wanted to get devise to redirect to the last page the user visited. So I did the following…

def after_sign_in_path_for(resource)
    request.referer
end

Works great…except if the user is actually logging in through the original form which causes a redirect loop.

I tried

def after_sign_in_path_for(resource)
   if (request.referer == "/users/sign_in")
  :pages_home
 else
  request.referer
 end

end

But thats not working, most likely because I have no idea what request.referer is actually returning when it encounters the original user login page (www.example.com/users/sign_in).

Any ideas?

tldr; Using devise, I want to redirect to the page logged in from (i.e /blog/4) unless the page is /users/sign_in

SOLVED:

Matchu was right. The request.referer was returning the domain as well…

http://example.com/users/sign_in

(note: no www prefix)

I’m still interested in an alternative to request.referer if its an insecure or inefficient way.

Answer 1

Don’t redirect to referrers – it’s generally a bad idea.

Instead, pass a next value across in the query-string or form-data. Perhaps use something like:

def after_sign_in_path_for(resource)
  params[:next] || super
end

When a user tries to visit a page requiring authentication (e.g., /admin/posts/3/edit) the authentication before_filter issues a redirect_to new_session_url(:next => request.path). Then code up the login action and view to preserve the :next query-string parameter.