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I am trying to create profile pages for my community site. I have followed video tutorials and read docs on github for both Devise gem and CanCan gem. I have installed and currently have a functioning authentication system thanks to these two gems and the tutorials at railscasts.

I am very new to ruby and rails so everything is still very literal. My first question relates to a line of code from CanCan wiki page

<!-- in users/_form.html.erb -->
<%= f.collection_select :role, User::ROLES, :to_s, :humanize %>

I do not see a users folder or this controller. Is this something I can generate - for example I ran

rails g devise User

Could I also run:

rails g controller Users

I have seen this question here but do not quite understand the answer. Will I get an error by generating the "Users" controller to handle the things I would like to do?

I generated the devise views, but don't see any controllers - I understand that these could be overwritten - although I dont quite understand how this would work. If I overwrite than would all default devise controller functionality still work plus overwritten controller?

If I can generate the "Users" controller, I assume I could just put a view template into that location for all of the profile view information. I apologize for the amount of questions and length of this post, but I think with a little help I could be off and running again. Thanks for any information provided.

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Thomas
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1 Answers1

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Alright so I solved this! I will post my solution for anyone with a similar question who could potentially benefit.

One of my questions was:

Could I also run:

rails g controller Users

Yes this is what I did. I use nifty scaffold generators to generate the views so this command would actually look like the following

rails g nifty:scaffold user

It is important to note that I DID NOT pass any variables after user. Devise has already created Users table in the database. This would create a conflict. Rails thinks you would like to overwrite your original database - which you do not want to do.

Do this builds the correct structure for User CRUD. Next open your config/routes.rb file. Using nifty generators add the resources :users to the top of this file - move this below the devise resource and prefix the path as described on this devise wiki page to resemble the code below. 

devise_for :users, :path_prefix => 'd'
resources :users

This is very important to remove any conflicts with your User controller and the devise controllers url paths by adding the "/d/" prefix to all devise controllers.

As well as adding the following code to you users_controller update method:

if params[:user][:password].blank?
  params[:user].delete(:password)
  params[:user].delete(:password_confirmation)
end

Which ensures devise will validate correctly.

Now comes the fun - register a user if you have not done so already. You now have a profile page for that user located at:

localhost:3000/users/1 localhost:3000/users/2 localhost:3000/users/3 ...ect

You can edit user show.html.erb page in the views folder to change what information will display on each users profile page.

As for my question about Roles:

<!-- in users/_form.html.erb -->
<%= f.collection_select :role, User::ROLES, :to_s, :humanize %>

You now have access to this in the user controllers created by nifty-scaffold generator, so you can add this code to your form if you were also following Ryan Bates methods to integrate CanCan roles as described here.

Hopefully this help some else.

Thomas
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