Session[:user_id] / name problem! Help!

Rails
1

Ok, I have a login on my site, and when I log in, I want to display
“Welcome #{user}”.

In my session, if I do “Welcome <%= session[:user_id] %>” I’ll get
“Welcome 1” which is right, but how can I access the name based on the
session id?

For instance, essentially I want to do this:

“Welcome <%= session[:user_name] %>”

or

“Welcome <%= session[:user_id].name %>”

You can see what I’m trying, but I’m fairly new to all of this, so I’m
sure these things seem ridiculous to you. I’ve been reading the Agile
Web Dev with RoR book, so I’m learning, but still can’t seem to get
this.

Please Help! Thanks a lot…

2

On Monday, May 08, 2006, at 6:30 PM, ryan wrote:

–
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try

<%= User.find(session[:user_id]).name %>

You can save the entire user object in the session, but if you do that
you may also save all their associated objects as well. This could get
big. You would also need to reload the User object or changes to it may
go undetected.

An alternative would be to simply store the user name in the session at
the same time you write the user_id, so you might have something like
‘session[:user_name]’ to call on. This might be preferable since it
prevents a database query just to print the user name.

_Kevin

3

ryan wrote:

Ok, I have a login on my site, and when I log in, I want to display
“Welcome #{user}”.

In my session, if I do “Welcome <%= session[:user_id] %>” I’ll get
“Welcome 1” which is right, but how can I access the name based on the
session id?

For instance, essentially I want to do this:

“Welcome <%= session[:user_name] %>”

or

“Welcome <%= session[:user_id].name %>”

You can see what I’m trying, but I’m fairly new to all of this, so I’m
sure these things seem ridiculous to you. I’ve been reading the Agile
Web Dev with RoR book, so I’m learning, but still can’t seem to get
this.

Please Help! Thanks a lot…

I usually create a before filter that fetches my user. So in
app/controllers/application.rb

before_filter :get_user
def get_user
@user = User.find(session[:user_id]) if session[:user_id]
end

Now in any views you can do:

Welcome <%= @user ? @user.name : ‘Guest’ %>!

Note that on any page that can be seen by logged in people and
non-logged in people, you have to make sure that the @user object
exists, other you will be calling the “name” method on “nil” which would
raise a big ugly error.