Question

this is my first question here and I am currently trying to build my first Ruby on Rails app so this question might be kind of basic.

The Problem:

I want a form on the root site which consists of only two fields, email and password for a user model. Depending on whether the email address that was typed in already exists or not, the form should forward the request to the ‘users#create’ (i.e. create a new user) or the ‘sessions#create’ (i.e. Sign the user in … if the password is correct)

What I tried:

To solve this I created a new action in the pages controller called ‘decide’ and pointed the form to that page.

It basically looks like this:

def decide
  if User.find_by_email(params[:email])
    # Copied in all of the code from sessions#create
    # with a redirect at the end so a /decide page doesn't get rendered
  else
    # Copied in all of the code from users#create
    # with a redirect at the end so a /decide page doesn't get rendered
  end
end

—

Now this works and I’m pretty proud of myself that I figured it out as a complete beginner, but I can hear experienced programmers crying out in agony at this code. I’m pretty sure this is not the “Rails Way”.

I repeat a large amount of code and I feel like I’m putting something in a controller that wasn’t made for that purpose.

Another problem is that I can’t get my rspec integration test to work, which basically goes to the root_path, fills in the form with a new user, hits the button and expects a success flash… but the test gets returned an empty html document on pressing the button. Although it works perfectly fine when I do the same thing in a browser.

So I figured:

Couldn’t you somehow put the above if statement in the routes.rb file and redirect the request to the respective controller and action?

If so how?

Or does anyone have a different idea how to accomplish this?

Thank you,

-Konstantin

Answer 1

Actually, that’s a fairly solid way of handling the problem.

Routes in Rails are only supposed to be a simple way of mapping URLs to code. Logic like that belongs exactly where you’ve placed it: in the controller.