Guest users

I haven't touched my SLPapp for a while, as recently I've been mainly working on studying algorithms and solving various mathematical problems. It is amazing how easy it is to forget what you've been doing before. Just two weeks pass and you look at your own code and you ask yourself: who wrote it? What is it even all about?

Anyway, it is certainly time to get back to my SLPapp, as I would like to finish it soon. One of the new features I wanted to implement is creating a guest user with Devise.

I first looked at the Devise wiki, whose approach is to create a guest user in a session. Unfortunately, the guest user would persist only as long as the browser session is open. For my purposes, I wanted the guest user to have almost the same functionality as a regular user. Specifically, I wanted the guest user to be able to create the same - or almost the same associations - as a regular user. In this case, it seemed appropriate to use an approach discussed in RailsCasts episode #393. The approach is as follows: create a guest user in a database, sign them in, and delete all guest users from the database using a rake task (for example, every 24 hours).

In ApplicationController:

    def create_guest_user
        u = User.new { |user| user.guest = true }
        u.email = "guest_#{Time.now.to_i}#{rand(100)}@example.com"
        u.save!(:validate => false)
        sign_in(:user, u)
        redirect_to root_path
    end

In routes.rb:

match '/sign_in_guest', to: "application#create_guest_user", via: 'get'

In a view:

<%= link_to "Guest Login", sign_in_guest_path %>

As a result, a user can click on a "Guest Login" link, and a unique guest user is generated and saved to the database automatically. The user can perform almost the same operations as a regular user. Currently, there is no option to save all the temp data if a guest user decides to sign up but I may reconsider this later.