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Asked: 2026-05-23T00:18:14+00:00

I’m migrating a Rails 2 app over to Rails 3, and hitting a major

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I’m migrating a Rails 2 app over to Rails 3, and hitting a major problem. I’ve got a method being called in my application.html.erb called check_author_role which is throwing 

undefined local variable or method `check_author_role'

The check_author_role method is defined in a file called lib/authenticated_system.rb.

I learned that Rails 3 no longer autoloads the lib/ directory, so I’ve added the following lines to config/application.rb:

config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib)
config.autoload_paths += Dir["#{config.root}/lib/**/"]

I thought that would do it. However I’m still getting the error. This implies that one of the following is going on:

  1. config/application.rb isn’t being loaded properly
  2. My autoload syntax is wrong
  3. I’m defining the method in a deprecated way
  4. I’m calling the method in a deprecated way

I’ve been at this for a few hours now and can’t make heads or tails of it. All was fine before the Rails 3 update. Anyone have some suggestions?

Here’s what lib/authenticated_system.rb looks like:

module AuthenticatedSystem
  protected

  def check_author_role
    check_role('author')
  end    

  def check_role(role)
    if logged_in? && @current_user.has_role?(role)
      true
    else
      access_denied
    end
  end
end

And here’s what app/layout/application.html.erb looks like:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  <head profile="http://www.w3.org/2005/10/profile">
    ...
  </head>
  <body>
    ...
    <% if check_author_role %>
      ...
    <% end %>
    ...
  </body>
</html>

And lastly, here’s config/application.rb

require File.expand_path('../boot', __FILE__)

require 'rails/all'

Bundler.require(:default, Rails.env) if defined?(Bundler)

module MyApp
  class Application < Rails::Application
    # Settings in config/environments/* take precedence over those specified here.
    # Application configuration should go into files in config/initializers
    # -- all .rb files in that directory are automatically loaded.

    # Custom directories with classes and modules you want to be autoloadable.
    # config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/extras)
    config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib)
    config.autoload_paths += Dir["#{config.root}/lib/**/"]

    ...

  end
end

I admit that I’m fuzzy on how helper methods work, especially in Rails 3. Here’s what I’m noticing.

In lib/authenticated_system.rb:

# Inclusion hook to make methods
# available as ActionView helper methods.
def self.included(base)
  base.send :helper_method, :current_user, :logged_in?, :check_role, :check_administrator_role, :check_author_role, :has_role, :has_administrator_role, :has_author_role
end

I’ll be honest and say I don’t really know what base.send is all about.

In app/controllers/application.rb I have the following:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  helper :all # include all helpers, all the time

  include AuthenticatedSystem

Again, I’m afraid I don’t fully understand what exactly this code is up to.

Curiously I notice that I also have a file in the same directory with a very similar name: app/controllers/application_controller.rb. It’s almost empty, with only three lines.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  protect_from_forgery
end

My hypothesis: app/controllers/application_controller.rb is the new Rails 3 file, while app/controllers/application.rb has my old code from my Rails 2 site. I’ll test this.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Is the AuthenticatedSystem module mixed in to your application_controller?

    If so, then methods there will not be automatically available in the views.

    You need to add something like:

    helper :check_author_role

    … in your application_controller, after mixing in the AuthenticatedSystem module.

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