redirect_to and the missing session

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

My application responds to a URL along the lines of http://myapp/xxxx where routes.rb determines that xxxx is not an action but an affiliate code from a referral from another site. The affiliate is validated and then the browser is redirected to the 'new' action.

  def affiliate     reset_session # we should not have any session data set if we reach here which we will have if we are testing!     affiliate = params[:affiliate] # this is parsed by routes.rb     if Affiliate.validate?(affiliate)       session[:affiliate_name] = affiliate     else       log.info 'Invalid affiliate'     end     redirect_to :action => 'new'   end

when I try to access the session data in the 'new' action to pre- populate the object with the validated affiliate name, my session data is not there. All I have is _csrf_token which suggests that I never wrote the session in the affiliate action or didn't send the cookie on the redirect.

The response I get is:

http://myapp:3000/quote/new Completed in 120ms (DB: 2) | 302 Found [http://myapp/xxxx\]

Does a 302 not send a cookie back to the browser and therefore the 'new' action is the first action to use the session and just creates a new one?

Alternatives? Well I can get it working by passing the affiliate as part of the url to the 'new' action but this then means the url looks messy, and it could be easily modified so I would have to revalidate the affiliate all over again.

O.

2

An update.

I have just created a very simple sandpit application and it works correctly. See below.

class AController < ApplicationController

  def hello     @content = session[:keepthis]   end

  def parameter     reset_session     session[:keepthis] = params[:affiliate]     redirect_to :action => 'hello'   end

end

and a routes.rb is

  map.a "a/:action",             :controller => "a"

  map.a ":affiliate",               :controller => "a",               :action => "parameter",               :requirements => { :affiliate => /\w+/ }

Ok. So the new application was generated new on Rails 2.3.4 and the misbehaving application was built on 2.3.2 and was upgraded to 2.3.4. I will go and check the release notes but if anyone has any pointers on this then I would be very grateful.

Thanks.

O.

3

Ok, so this has turned out to be a discussion with myself, well at least I have a nice new sandpit application to play with in future. Just for completeness of this discussion (I wouldn't want to be waiting to talk to myself would I?) the answer is .....

Sleep on it. Think about it in the shower and then change environment.rb to RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '2.3.4' unless defined? RAILS_GEM_VERSION and just restart the server (always something to remember).

So the Rails upgrade was the issue, I guess there was a conflict in there somewhere.

Coffee.

Look forward to future discussion.

O.