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ruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-4devisetimeoutcancan

Message "true" flashes on main page after session timeout

I have a Rails4 app and I'm trying to flash a custom message when a session times out due to inactivity.

I'm doing this by configuring the timeout_in setting in devise.rb:

Devise.setup do |config|
  ...
  config.timeout_in = 30.minutes
  ...
end

and adding a custom rescue to my application controller: 

rescue_from CanCan::AccessDenied do |exception|
  if user_signed_in?
    flash.now.alert = exception.message
    render text: '', layout: true, status: 403
  else
    redirect_to new_user_session_path, notice: flash[:alert] || "You must login first"
  end
end

Everything seems to be working fine... when the session times out, flash[:alert] already has the correct message so I just use that and when the user tries to access a resource without logging in first then the "You must login first" message is returned.

This is the code in the the main.html.haml page that renders these alerts:

.container
  .main-content
    #flash
      - flash.each do |type, msg|
        %div{class: ('alert alert-dismissable fade in')}
          %button.close{data: {dismiss: :alert}} ×
          = msg
    = yield

The problem is that once a while I see a flash with the text "True" appearing right below the session timeout message:

Message showing True

and I can't figure out where it's coming from. It seems that something is creating a flash message with that value. I wonder what am I doing wrong or if there a better way to display a session timeout messages. Any ideas?

Solution

  • Try outputting the type of each flash – maybe Devise or something else is using the flash for other things than just messages. Read more about using the flash for other things than messages.

    I wouldn't loop over all flash keys to render them – I'd explicitly render only the ones that are dedicated to messages (usually :notice and :alert).