restful_authentication[1] is a great plugin, but the standard svn version is showing it's age. It's a whole month or so out of date... which is, of course, an eternity in the fast-paced world of Rails.
Luckily it's actually just moved home. You can find the up-to-date version on github
[1] Formerly known as acts_as_authenticated
We're using restful_authentication for login - because it's a good standard set of tools. However, we didn't want activation for our system, as it's just a slow-down on the path to user kick-ass-ness, and we wanted out users up and running with a minimum of fuss. However what we *did* want, was statefulness (so we could suspend users).
When I ran the usual generator without the --include-activation flag, I figured that would be the trick...
Unfortunately, AR doesn't seem to grasp that you can have statefulness without activation - so the authentication/authorisation sections have an activation state (and set up an activation code and require that you provide it and activate your user... etc) regardless of your choice of --include-activation.
This is a bit annoying - especially because the Authorization module is now also hidden deep in the bowels of the AR plugin itself (rather than in the user model), which means I can't just delete the bits I don't want.
The plugin itself is not clear about how to go about setting up your own set of states (eg removing activation, or adding a "locked" state), so this is a quickie guide.
To begin with, to override your states, you need to copy the appropriate Authorization file into your lib directory eg:
cp vendor/plugins/restful_authentication/lib/authorization/stateful_roles.rb lib/my_stateful_roles.rb
Then require this file at the top of your user model eg:
require 'lib/my_stateful_roles.rb'
Open up this file and change the module name so you don't clash (in the bizarre case you need to use the standard set of states in some other model) eg:
module Authorization module MyStatefulRoles
Your user model will then have a reference to this module that you need to update from Authorization::StatefulRoles to Authorization::MyStatefulRoles
You now have a file that you can alter to your heart's content.
Coming soon: how to successfully remove the activation state from this file...
I spun up a new rails project and downloaded my favourite authentication plugin restful_authentication, only to find that all out-of-the-box tests break (oh noez!)
Clearly, I thought, restful_authentication is now just a millisecond behind edge rails... and therefore doesn't work properly anymore.
I quickly realised that no, it's just that the old-standard install (via svn) is no longer maintained - you have to move over to the github version.
This solves most of the problems, but I was still having a problem with one of the tests. It seems that acts_as_state_machine is similarly non-Rails 2.0 compliant.
Luckily, acts_as_state_machine has just a one-line fix to get it back up to scratch. It seems that the write_attribute method has been deprecated, and this causes a little bit of internal havoc for the state? style of methods (eg passive?, active? etc as used by restful_authentication).
The test cases kept giving me:
NoMethodError: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it! The error occurred while evaluating nil.to_sym
To fix it, search for the string: "def set_initial_state", then replace the line (just below it):
write_attribute self.class.state_column, self.class.initial_state.to_s
with:
self.send "#{self.class.state_column}=", self.class.initial_state.to_s
