Safari Version 5.1.3 (7534.53.10) Browser problem --- removing cookie on OS X Lion 10.7.3 (11D50b) w

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