Rails 2.3 compatible version of limited_sessions is ready

Rails 2.3 made a lot of changes in how requests are handled. Most (all?) of this has to do with its new support for Rack. Anyway, all of these changes left Rails 2.3 incompatible with the last version of the Limited Sessions plugin.

So, here’s a shiny new version of Limited Sessions to go with your shiny new version of Rails.

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Rails plugin Limited Sessions updated

I updated my limited_sessions plugin to improve support for Rails 2.1. It should maintain backwards compatibility.

The change surrounds Rails 2.1’s new partial updates support. Basically, it’s turned off for sessions so the session is kept current and doesn’t expire if the user is active.

limited sessions

new limited_sessions plugin for rails

it’s time to announce my second plugin for ruby on rails, limited_sessions.

it’s been publicly available for several days, so i guess it’s time that i actually talk about it.

this came out of a need to manage sessions more intelligently than rails does by default. all of these is built as an extension to ActiveRecordStore, so sessions must be stored in the db. features:

• configurable, server-enforced session expiry time (eg: 2 hours from last access)
• optional hard limit on session from login time, regardless of access (eg: 8 hours from login)
• ability to tie session to user’s IP or /24 subnet
• auto-cleaning of expired sessions from db without an external script or other helper

as usual, details are on the project page.

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)}

uploading multiple files with attachment_fu

i was recently sharing with someone how to make multiple uploads work with the attachment_fu plugin. as an aside, attachment_fu is the successor to acts_as_attachment. if you were planning to use acts_as_attachment, upgrade your plans and use attachment_fu instead.

multiple file uploads are actually fairly straight forward.

first, in the view:

1<%= file_field_tag 'attachment_data[]' %>

put as many of these in the view as desired. it’s also easy to cause an arbitrary number of them to be added via javascript by the user’s browser.

then, in the controller:

1@attachment = Attachment.new
2params[:attachment_data] ||= []
3params[:attachment_data].each do |file|
4  @attachment = Attachment.create({:uploaded_data => file}) unless file == ""
5end

Attachment is my model for uploaded file—substitute as appropriate. as this isn’t a complete how-to for attachment_fu, i won’t get into configuring attachment_fu or the model here.

that’s it. that wasn’t so painful, eh?