This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Eric Stewart. Original Post: Who is online, really? Feed Title: Ponderings On Ruby Feed URL: http://blog.eric-stewart.com/category/programming-ruby.rss Feed Description: This is the Ruby related section of Eric Stewart's weblog. These entries will be the commentary of a long time Java/C++ programmer that started exploring Ruby in 2003. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Eric Stewart Latest Posts From Ponderings On Ruby

Courtenay was pondering today how to figure out who is online in your Rails app. I’m liking his solution better thank what I thought up on this a few days back, but since he asks….

My solution was a bit quicker and dirtier. I wanted to jump in and get a list without that oh-so-tedious (wink) process of creating a new model class. So, what I did was:

Make sure I was using ActiveRecordStore for sessions.

Just as Courtenay describes, create your sessions table:

rake create_sessions_table

But remember, I was trying to avoid an actual model class. Moving on…

Create a handy controller action

This is the meat of it. In the action I want to use to list active sessions I do something like this.

@sessions = CGI::Session::ActiveRecordStore.session_class.find(:all)
@session_pages = Paginator.new self, @sessions.size, 10, @params['page']

Of course, I was tring to be all fancy and show a paginated listing of active sessions.

Then..

Slap a nice view in

Put a nice view in and access your sessions data (in helper or rhtml template) like so:

  session.data['user'].fullname