Embedding users in accounts with Devise and Mongoid

2013-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

This gist referred to by the Devise wiki is no longer accurate as far as I can tell. So I wanted to share my approach for how to use devise in a situation where user documents are embedded in account documents, especially in the scenario where your account has a subdomain assigned to it.

Obviously, the first thing you need to do is make sure you always have access to the current account as keyed by the subdomain. This means a before filter on any controller that runs under the subdomain that loads in your account. The idea is that once you load the account, you never have to pull it from the database again:

class AccountSubdomainController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :current_account

protected
  def current_account
    @account ||= params[:current_account] ||= get_account_by_subdomain
    params[:user][:current_account] = @account if params[:user]
    @account
  end

  def get_account_by_subdomain
    Account.where(:subdomain => request.subdomain.downcase).first
  end
end

If you’re not using an account-specific subdomain, just modify this to pull out the account from the URL or something.

Once we have our account, we need to inject the current account into the params to keep it over the whole request. We also need them in the users subhash if authentication is currently being run. That means you need to define current_account in your authentication keys, either in the devise.rb initializer or on your model’s devise invocation:

config.authentication_keys = [:email, :current_account]

This tells devise to use not only the email request parameter but also the current_account parameter to look up users. Now we just need to override the lookup method for authentication:

  def self.find_for_database_authentication(conditions)
    acct = conditions[:current_account] || Account.where("users.email" => conditions[:email]).first
    acct && acct.users.where(:email => conditions[:email]).first
  end

That’s sufficient for the initial login, but if you stop there your app will authenticate correctly, store the user in the session, but never be able to pull it back out. We need to a way to get to the params to pull that current_account out and provide it to the user model for a proper lookup. This is where shit gets a little hacky, because we’re going to create an initializer that overrides how Warden does something:

class Warden::SessionSerializer
  def deserialize(keys)
    klass_name, *args = keys

    # add current account into mix so we don't have to pull it from the db again!
    args << params[:current_account] if params[:current_account]

    begin
      klass = ActiveSupport::Inflector.constantize(klass_name)
      if klass.respond_to? :serialize_from_session
        klass.serialize_from_session(*args)
      else
        Rails.logger.warn "[Devise] Stored serialized class #{klass_name} seems not to be Devise enabled anymore. Did you do that on purpose?"
        nil
      end
    rescue NameError => e
      if e.message =~ /uninitialized constant/
        Rails.logger.debug "[Devise] Trying to deserialize invalid class #{klass_name}"
        nil
      else
        raise
      end
    end
  end
end

That’s the link between the current_account in the request and our user model. Now we just need a way to use it, and instead of using self.find like that old gist, we’d be better off implementing this on our model:

def self.serialize_from_session(*args)
  key, salt, account = args
  single_key = key.is_a?(Array) ? key.first : key
  account.users.find single_key
end

You should be all set now. Note that this hack has not been well tested, but I thought it was high time somebody shared a different approach. Please advise if you have criticisms or a better way.

Social Memory Complex: devise

Embedding users in accounts with Devise and Mongoid