Rails: page protection redirection problem with link_to_unless_current

Question

When using before_filter :login_required to protect a particular page, the link_to_unless_current method in the application layout template renders the "Login" link for the login page as a hyperlink instead of just text.

The "Login" text/link problem only occurs when redirected to the Login Page via the before_filter machinery, otherwise, the link_to_unless_current method operates as expected.

It seems that link_to_unless_current is using the old page data as the "current" instead of the login page (when redirecting).

Answer 1

Does your before_filter do a redirect or just render the login page?

Answer 2

Can you show us your link_to_current block? And also, where is login_required redirecting to?

Answer 3

Appreciate the responses and you can tell by the nature of the question that we're new to rails. By the way, we posted the same question on this site: http://railsforum.com (not sure if it's the official rails forum) with no response yet. StackOverflow so far seems to be creating a great community of helpers willing to reach out to the programmatically challenged.

I think part of the problem is that we were mixing restful urls with standard routes. The login page is mapped to the restful route "/login" but the page redirection was using "/sessions/new" (Rick Olson's restful authentication module)

In application.rb, we forced the filter to "/login" and that solved the problem:

before_filter :login_required

protected

def login_required
  return true if logged_in?
  session[:return_to] = request.request_uri
  flash[:error] = "Please log in first"
  redirect_to "/login" and return false
end

Comments on the technical merits of this approach appreciated as it may be helpful to other newbs.

Thanks, Joe

Answer 4

You can use a route helper method to perform the page redirection:

 redirect_to login_url

If a "named route" for login is defined (which is done by adding an explicit path to "/login" in your "config/routes.rb" file).

This path is actually the same as that generated by:

new_session_url

For a detailed look at routing, I suggest the Rails Routing Guide.