reading sessions in rails

in ruby’s CGI::Session module, sessions are stored as a block of seeming junk, like this: “BMZWRlcm1hbiBCb25kaW5nIENvb”. it’s actually an encoded format which is all well and fine until you need to read something out of it for debugging purposes.

if you are using rails’ ActiveRecordStore, the contents of a session can be read fairly simply. since this relies on an AR model called Session, which your app most likely doesn’t have, we’ll create that too.

so, fire up 1script/console and input the following:

1class Session < ActiveRecord::Base ; end
2CGI::Session::ActiveRecordStore::Session.unmarshal(Session.find(:first).data)

that will dump the contents of the first session. :first can be replaced with any valid option to AR’s #find method.

dump all of the sessions with something like:

1Session.find(:all).collect {|s| CGI::Session::ActiveRecordStore::Session.unmarshal(s.data)}