# Signing out of remote sessions

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/signing-out-of-remote-sessions/175389>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [September 12, 2009, 1:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/signing-out-of-remote-sessions/175389 "2009-09-12T13:42:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2009, 1:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/signing-out-of-remote-sessions/175389/1 "2009-09-12T13:42:43Z")

</div>

Hi everyone,

My goal is to allow users of a Rails web app to see all their open  
sessions on other computers and close/sign out of them remotely.  
Similar to gmail’s “Account activity” page (link found at the bottom  
of the gmail inbox page).

I can technically achieve this by using the sessions in the database

```
account_sessions = CGI::Session::ActiveRecordStore::Session.find

```

(:all)

and iterating over them to find sessions corresponding to the current  
user (the user ID is stored in the session data), and allowing the  
user to destroy these sessions.

However, this doesn’t offer the usual convenience of working with  
Rails models. I can’t easily express a has\_many relationship with the  
user and make use of

current\_user.sessions

nor can I easily put an index on user\_id since it’s in the data part  
of the session (instead of being its own column).

This approach also may become impractical if the number of sessions  
grows, since in the above the table is read into memory.

As a solution, I’m thinking of creating my own model which “mirrors”  
the relevant portions of the session and is created/updated/destroyed  
to maintain that correspondence.

This isn’t a great way to go about it due to data replication and  
added complexity of code, but I didn’t find another way to do it.

So the question is: is this a good way to go about it, or am I missing  
something?

Thanks in advance!

Fraser

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2009, 4:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/signing-out-of-remote-sessions/175389/2 "2009-09-12T16:40:02Z")

</div>

Hi Fraser,

On Fri, 2009-09-11 at 14:48 -0700, Fraser wrote:

> However, this doesn’t offer the usual convenience of working with  
> Rails models. I can’t easily express a has\_many relationship with the  
> user and make use of
> 
> current\_user.sessions
> 
> nor can I easily put an index on user\_id since it’s in the data part  
> of the session (instead of being its own column).

Assuming you’re using :active\_record\_store, you can add fields to the  
sessions table and I believe you could do the above. I can’t recall how  
to go about it, and it’s probably changed with the inclusion of Rack,  
but there is a way to find out the id of the record in the sessions  
table that’s holding your session data. Dig into the  
ActionController::SessionManagement code.

HTH,  
Bill