Question

I’m trying to make the user fill out a questionnaire if it is their first time visiting the site.

My controllers are set up like this:

class MainController < BaseController
end

class BaseController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :first_time_visiting?
end

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  def first_time_visiting?
    if session[:first_time].nil?
      session[:first_time] = 1
      redirect_to questionnaire_path unless current_user
    end
  end
end

When I close the browser and re-open it though, I always get redirected to the questionnaire.

Answer 1

You have to set a cookie in the browser for that user in order to allow detection at a later time, i.e. after the user closes the browser. Setting and reading cookies in rails is easy. Checkout the documentation for some example usage. http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionDispatch/Cookies.html