Knowing when a user is logged in

Rails
1

I am looking into creating a website similar to a chat program. I know
when the user logs in. However, the user can log out any of the
following ways:

Logout link - This one is easy to handle
User closer browser window
User hits the back button
User loses his/her internt connection.

Is there a way within rails to handle the latter three user actions?

Thanks!

2

Usually, the last three cases are handled with a timeout of some
kind. If the user’s browser doesn’t interact with the server at all
in a specific amount of time, then the server expires the session.

Tim

3

How do I know when the session expires? In the case of a chat room, I
would have to update the database or something so other people in the
room see that that person is no longer in the room.

Chris

4

You might want to use railscron to expire sessions that have not been
updated in 20 minutes.

        - dan

–
Dan K. mailto:[email protected]
http://www.dankohn.com/ tel:+1-415-233-1000

5

A simple solution to expire sessions is to set expiry in controllers.
E.g.,

class MyController
session :session_expires => 2.minutes.from_now
end

While nice, this is not a great way to keep a “who’s online” list. It’s
probably safest to keep an online status in the users table, and update
it
to Time.now each time a user browses to a new page. That way “who’s
online”
resolves to User.find(:conditions => [‘last_hit_server_at’ > ?',
2.minutes.ago]).

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