Update on HTTP session handling in Ruby?

ruby-talk
1

Hi,

I did spend a lot of time on searching the web (including
the ruby-talk search) for ruby’s HTTP session support
before spamming the list with this…

All I found are year-old (and older) mails, like:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/8643

Does this mean that the current cgi/session is just fine
now, or people gave up the quest for the Holy Grail?
(CGI::Session used to be a little handicapped compared
to e.g. PHP’s, AFAIK.)

(I need to know it for deciding if I can start porting a web
project to Ruby, or shall I keep hacking it further in PHP.)

Thanks all so much!
Sab

2

(Just for the record, in case another newbie tries to find something
like this in the archive…)

Does this mean that the current cgi/session is just fine
now, or people gave up the quest for the Holy Grail?
(CGI::Session used to be a little handicapped compared
to e.g. PHP’s, AFAIK.)

I had constant problems with sessions (but that’s just usual for me,
having constant problems with things working fine for others. :wink: ).

  1. Minimal sessioned .rhtml page I could come up with:

    <%
    require ‘cgi/session’
    session = CGI::Session.new( cgi = CGI.new(‘html4’) )
    begin

     session['var'] = 'xxx'
··· 

# You WILL use sessions from mod_ruby, so don't forget this
# for closing it (ie. closing the session-file, by default).
#
# See: http://www.modruby.net/doc/faq.en.html#label:14
#
ensure
    cgi.header    # *NASTY* hack to flush stuff to actually make the
                        # session live -- needed only for creating a session.
                        # Any nicer way, please?? (I DO NOT want to 
                        # clutter my "main stuff" (above) with cgi.calls, as 
                        # I only need sessions, and conceptually, CGI has 
                        # nothing to do with that. I want a clean page...)
    session.close
end

%>

  1. There is a fatal bug in cgi/session.rb (class FileStore):

If you do not use or set any session variables, hitting reload
on the page will kill the script (ruby 1.6.7):

[Tue Oct 8 18:53:36 2002] [error] mod_ruby: error in ruby
/usr/lib/ruby/1.6/cgi/session.rb:123:in update': undefined method each’ for nil (NameError)
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/cgi/session.rb:130:in close' from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/cgi/session.rb:81:in close’
from /tmp/index.rhtml.3335.0:11
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/apache/eruby-run.rb:112:in load' from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/apache/eruby-run.rb:112:in run’
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.6/apache/eruby-run.rb:78:in `handler’
from ruby:0

The problem: FileStore.update assumes @hash is never nil,
but FileStore.initialize does NOT initialize @hash if a file
for the current session-ID already exists…

Cheers,
Sz.

3

Hi,

···

In message “Session stub & a bug (Was: Update on HTTP session handling in Ruby?)” on 02/10/09, “Szabolcs Szasz” sz@szasz.hu writes:

  1. There is a fatal bug in cgi/session.rb (class FileStore):

If you do not use or set any session variables, hitting reload
on the page will kill the script (ruby 1.6.7):

This bug is fixed in the stable snapshot.

						matz.