Newby needs advice on membership function

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am developing a support ticket system in Ruby and need to know if there are any modules or anything that can be added to a project to require a user to log in to the system first and then be allowed access to the support ticket system.

If not, how would I go about verifying if a user is logged in before being allowed to view the pages in the site?

I appreciate the advice!

2

there are several generators and plugins for authentication, although i have not used any of them.

in your controller though, you should add something like

before_filter :check_authentication

with a protected check_authentication method in your controller. in that, you can check to see if a use is logged in, if not, you can redirect to your login page to prompt the user.

hope that helps some.

3

Alex,

Thanks for the simple explanation. That helped a lot. However, I have another question. You are setting the session[:user_id] in your ApplicationController. How do I make that persistent throughout my application? It does not appear to be setting the session variable as a "global" option in the ApplicationController. When I click a link to another :controller in the same application the other controller can't retrieve that session information. Is there a trick I am missing?

Thanks again for your help.

Andrew