After a successful DEVISE login, how to redirect user back to previous action that required login?

Question

I have an ajax voting button: If a user clicks on a \"thumbs up\" image, but is not logged in, then they should see a dialog box that asks them to login first.

To do thi

Answer 1

use a cookie. Get the window.location.href that they are trying to go to and store it as a cookie. On your home page, check for the presence of this cookier in the document ready function, redirect if its there

Answer 2

I do the following with Authlogic on Rails 3, perhaps you could use it or do something similar:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  after_filter :store_location
private
  def store_location
    session[:return_to] = request.fullpath
  end

  def clear_stored_location
    session[:return_to] = nil
  end

  def redirect_back_or_to(alternate)
    redirect_to(session[:return_to] || alternate)
    clear_stored_location
  end
end

Then you can use something like redirect_back_or_to dashboard_path in your login action.

For some controllers/actions, I don't want to store the location (e.g. the login page). For those I just skip the filter:

class UserController < ApplicationController
  skip_after_filter :store_location
end

There's also a page in the Devise wiki on doing this: https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/wiki/How-To:-Redirect-to-a-specific-page-on-successful-sign-in

Answer 3

In ApplicationController write following:

after_filter :store_location
def store_location
  session[:previous_urls] ||= []
  # store unique urls only
  session[:previous_urls].prepend request.fullpath if session[:previous_urls].first != request.fullpath
  # For Rails < 3.2
  # session[:previous_urls].unshift request.fullpath if session[:previous_urls].first != request.fullpath 
  session[:previous_urls].pop if session[:previous_urls].count > 2
end
def after_sign_in_path_for(resource)
  session[:previous_urls].last || root_path
end

Source: https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/wiki/How-To:-Redirect-back-to-current-page-after-sign-in,-sign-out,-sign-up,-update