ActionController.md

ActionController

What is it?

• It's a class --- and requests to the controller are just instances of the class
• Controllers are responsible for doing one of two things
• rendering something or redirecting to another URL
• Sinatra v. Rails
• The bulk of what you'd put in sinatra routes, are written in methods within the controller

Default Methods

• index
• new
• create
• update
• delete
• show
• edit

Routes - what are they?

• rake routes v. sinatra index.rb
• break out your routes into controllers
• route resources :users
• possibly show a complete rails app

Filters:

Before filters run on requests before the request get to the controller's actions.

So, authenticate before granting access to do something — the perfect before filter opportunity!

After filter runs after, duh. They can modify responses, like if you need to send an email after a user has taken an action.

• before_filters
• after_filters
• around_filters

LEARNING OPPORTUNITY: Shadi, want to explain around filters!?!

Params

• pretty much the same as sinatra

Sessions & Cookies

• Rails apps have a session for each user:
• Only available in the view and the controller
• Sessions ID's are always stored in the cookie, you should never pass sessions thru a URL

Session Storage:

• ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore – Stores everything on the client.
• ActiveRecord::SessionStore – Stores the data in a database using Active Record.
• ActionDispatch::Session::CacheStore – Stores the data in the Rails cache.
• ActionDispatch::Session::MemCacheStore – Stores the data in a memcached cluster (this is a legacy implementation; consider using CacheStore instead).

You can configure where the session is stored with some code by creating a session_store.rb file

YourApp::Application.config.session_store :cookie_store, :key => '_your_app_session'

Accessing Sessions

• Just like a hash:

• i.e. if you wanna get anything or store anything in a session all you gotta do is session[:foobar] = "Neil"

  session[:foobar] == "Neil"?

Cookies:

• like sessions, cookies work like hashes, you can store anything in them.

cookies[:foobar] = "foo"

cookies[:foobar] == "foo"?

Helper methods

• Can be defined within the controller using the helper_method :method
• Show examples
• CSRF and protect_from_forgery