Creating a temporary User

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am confused as to how to create a temporary User to retrieve / set tasks to. I am fairly certain this is the direction I am supposed to be moving in, but can't figure out what I am doing wrong. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I want to do this "the right way"...rails 2.0, rest, etc.

# Tasks controller def index     @user = find_user     @tasks = Task.find(:all, :conditions => ["user_id = ?, completed is null", @user])     respond_to do |format|       format.html # index.html.erb       format.xml { render :xml => @tasks }     end   end   ...   def find_user     # if there isn't a user return a new one with a fake name     unless session[:user]       session[:user] = User.new     end     session[:user]     logger.info "#{session[:user]}"   end

2

Assuming that you have pushed a real User object into session at some point then, yes, that should work.

The one change that you should probably make work be to use the association proxies to do some of the work for you.

Assuming that User has_many :tasks Task belongs_to :user

Then the second line of your index method should read:

@tasks = @user.tasks.find(:all, :conditions=>{:completed => nil})

The advantage here is that you can choose to reorganize the relationships between the user and tasks (e.g., assign one task to multiple users through a join table when someone is sick or unavailable) but your TasksController code does not have to change. The current code is tightly coupled to the current object relationship.