Hi All, Hope this note helps the newbies to Rails As I'm new to Rails, I'd like to share how I tracked down Safari's dropping of my cookie.
My Applebug no: 11003492 registered 7 March/2012
My development platform: MacPro running rails 3.1.1 on OS X Lion 10.7.3 (11D50b)
Problem: Firefox worked as programmed but switching to Safari my current_user_token kept in the cookie[:remember_user_token] became nil. Later in the debug sessions, this value returned was due to the cookie being removed by Safari --- not present!
The steps leading to Safari dropping of the cookie 1) signin and set the cookie[:remember_user_token] to User.id 2) get /index_stats for user --- cookie still valid 3) get /show_stats : rendering the view showed that the cookie value returned was nil
How to debug the problem?: 1) Use the Ruby method set_trace_func to see the source code being executed a) U must be judicious in turning on / off the set_trace_func method as it blows out a lot of source tracing. b) Use of Unix split utility helped at the beginning to pare down the size of file to edit as u could blow up your editor due to size
2) from the above output it lead me to look at the Ruby source code: /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/actionpack-3.1.1/ lib/action_dispatch/middleware/cookies.rb
3) By reading the ruby code and to modify it to output some of its values to STDOUT this allowed me to refine the next debugging steps to catch the problem . Note use of logger.debug in the above source will not work as the logger method is not defined!
4) I refined my tracing output strategies and ran it against both browsers: Firefox and Safari for a comparison analysis.
5) Running the Unix diff utility against the 2 browser outputs homed in on Safari missteps --- niled cookie
6) By inspecting the cookie for both browsers, it showed that Safari had removed the cookie[:remember_user_token] I sent to Apple these 2 traced outputs as evidence of the Safari problem.
Recap: I found set_trace_func a good starting point to see what is happening. I experimented with ruby-debug but this was too fined-grained for my current problem at hand.
Hope this helps to your programming efforts. Dave