Determining current_user with declarative_authorization and authlogic

Question

I use authlogic to authenticate users. In my controllers I use current_user, defined (as documented) as follows:

  def current_user_session
    return @current_user_session if defined?(@current_user_session)
    @current_user_session = UserSession.find
  end
  def current_user
    return @current_user if defined?(@current_user)
    @current_user = current_user_session && current_user_session.record
  end

I also use declarative_authorization to manage the current user's permissions. All works fine in the normal runtime scenario, but when I create functional tests that use request statements like " get_with", current_user in the controller is nil. I looked through the declarative_authorization test helper code and found that in this scenario, the declarative_authorization gem actually stores the current user in Authorization.current_user (which in turn comes from Thread.current["current_user"]). So there seems to be quite a mixup of how a current user is handled in different scenario's.

My question: what is the appropriate way of finding the current_user in both the normal runtime and the test scenario?

Answer 1

You can define a before_filter like this in application_controller.

before_filter { |c| Authorization.current_user = c.current_user }

Answer 2

Angelus, you were right. I shouldn't be using get_with, post_with, etc. These just set the Authorization.current_user, session[:user] and session[:user_id] and these seem to be obsolete with authlogic. And for some reason, these even set UserSession to nil, which was causing the problem. So UserSession.create(users(:admin)), followed by a regular get, post, etc. is the way to go.