Question

In my Rails application I’m trying to make the controllers skinnier and am having difficulty with one object that I keep having to pass around.

The object represents a user’s facebook session and is instantiated off of the session so it exists in the controller side of things. Many model methods use it, so it is repeatedly passed in as an argument all over the place.

This smells like something, how to DRY it up the Rails way? Thanks!

Answer 1

First, I would recommend using a system similar to Authlogic for your authentication. This gives you two bonuses:

• You have proven, stable, tested authentication for your application
• The sessions are based like Models, so you can do this kind of stuff…

---

class Widget < ActiveRecord::Base
  def do_facebook_stuff
    UserSession.find #This gets you the current session
    UserSession.find.record # This gets your the user for the current session
  end
end

Now you no longer need to pass the session information in, as you can do basic model-style lookups to find it. In addition to this, Authlogic has a plugin architecture that supports Facebook Connect, which may help you further.