Question

I’m sending users, once logged into my app to the standard users#show page.

def show
  @user = User.find(params[:id])
end

But rather than the URL showing /users/50 I’d like it to just show a generic /welcome. I still need access to a users data in the view so I can use things like <%= @user.name %>.

Is that straightforward?

Answer 1

Sure it’s straightforward. If @user is the logged-in user, then you must be storing a session cookie somewhere. Just use that to set the user. Assuming your session cookie stores the user’s name, you’d have something like this:

def welcome
  @user = User.find_by_name(session[:user])
  # other controller code
end

Normally you wouldn’t handle the session cookie directly like this, but instead set current_user in ApplicationController and refer to that. A before_filter is a good way to set that up, so that current_user is available in all controllers:

before_filter :initialize_user

def initialize_user
   @current_user = User.find_by_name(session[:user]) if session[:user]
end

Then you can just set @user like this:

def welcome
  @user = current_user
  # other controller code
end

There are other ways to do this, but whatever you do you’ll need to have a session cookie set somewhere in order for this to work (since no info about the user is stored in the welcome url).