jovoto development blog

Authlogic, a popular authentication plugin for RoR, has its share of magic, some well documented, some less.

One thing that kept me busy yesterday was the absence of the logged_in? method on instances of the User class. Turns out, authlogic, again, adapts its abilities depending on which columns the users table has. For the logged_in? method to exist, the column last_request_at must exist.

Now in the code there is a little bit of confusion, because in the authlogic lib file logged_in_status.rb there are actually two places dealing with this dependency:

def logged_in?
  raise "Can not determine the records login state because\ 
  there is no last_request_at column" if !respond_to?(:last_request_at)

  !last_request_at.nil? && last_request_at > logged_in_timeout.seconds.ago
end

The exception should have brought me onto the right track, but, as it turns out, the instance methods themselves are only included, if the column last_logged_in exists, see the line

return if !klass.column_names.include?("last_request_at")

of the same file. So there you have it: no exception, just a silent absence of the method logged_in?.

Happy authenticating!