Forum: Ruby on Rails default page and session[]

Hi Everybody!

As a newcomer to this list and to Rails per se I would like to to
post my silly newbie questions â?? be patient:

1. I'm not able to get rid of the welcome-aboard-screen. It says:
> 3. Set up a default route and remove or rename this file
>
> Routes are setup in config/routes.rb.
I've done the routing part â?? at least I think I have! Now, as for the
removing or renaming of *that* file: where on earth is it?!?!

2. I want to use session[:language] to save the current working
language between requests. But whenever I mention the yet unassigned
symbol of session Rails throughs an exception:
>  NoMethodError in ExpressionsController#list
>
> You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
> You might have expected an instance of Array.
> The error occured while evaluating nil.[]
The method causing the error is
>   def get_language
>     session[:language] ||= Language.find(1)
>   end

Your help is greatly appreciated!
- Sebastian

>1. I'm not able to get rid of the welcome-aboard-screen. It says:
> 3. Set up a default route and remove or rename this file
>>
>> Routes are setup in config/routes.rb.
> I've done the routing part â?? at least I think I have! Now, as for the
> removing or renaming of *that* file: where on earth is it?!?!

Don't feel bad!  I just spent three days last week working on this!!

The file they are referring to is /public/indx.html

I simply renamed mine, then set up a default rout (map.connect '', 
:controller => 'www') and it worked like a charm!

Not too sure about #2 at the moment... hope someone else can contribute 
there!

HTH,
-Luke

Sebastian Winkler wrote:

>> You might have expected an instance of Array.
>> The error occured while evaluating nil.[]
> The method causing the error is
>>   def get_language
>>     session[:language] ||= Language.find(1)
>>   end

truth be told, i'm not really out of the class of Newbies, but my guess 
would be one of two..either you haven't defined the session(or is it 
@session) in the right place(are you putting this in the 
appcontroller/..?) or the specified language (1) isn't found in the 
model...if you aren't going to use many languages, couldn't you go like 
this:

@session[:language] ||= 'english'
@session[:language] ||= 'spanish'
..

good luck either way,

s

For #2:

Session access can only be done in a controller. It should work as a
method call, but just to be safe, go ahead and treat it as an i-var, and
put an @, as so:

By the way, just so you know, the Ruby Way is to have varname() and
varname=(), not get_varname(), set_varname()

def language
    @session[:language] ||= Language.find(1)
end

Jason

> The file they are referring to is /public/indx.html
Thanks, Luke!!

Murule, the declaration is in a subclass of ApplicationController
where session[] should be accessible.

Murule and Jason, I really think it should be session[], not @session
[]; it's not an instance variable I'm trying to access?

Strangely, I seem to have been able to temporarily overcome this
error ? not knowing how, though. But now I have done some
reorganizing within the controller and I'm faced with the same
situation again.
As always it's probably something totally simple but easy to overlook
for the beginner.

- Sebastian

P.S. Jason, you're right the way the method is formulated should have
been called just 
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Well, this seems to be the solution:
I was calling the method from the controller's initialize method, at
which point session apparently isn't accessible yet.
I moved the call to the before_filter and now it works.

Thanks for your efforts, guys!

- Sebastian