Accessing User's Objects in Different States (Ruby on Rails, RESTful Authentication)

Question

In my Rails application I have a User model (more or less built by RESTful Authentication), and several other models belonging to the user. So let's say, for example:

user has_many :posts

post belongs_to :user

Anywhere in the users resource I can access the user variables as I would expect. @user.name, @user.email, @user.login, etc. all return the expected object.

However, I can't seem to access any of these attributes from any other resource (in this example, posts) without it returning nil (nil rather than a NoMethodError).

Why is this? It seems even stranger to me that I can call current_user just fine, as in current_user.name, current_user.email, but not for the user in question.

Answer 1

There are two users you could be talking about here.
1) the currently logged in user
2) the user who the post belongs to

the currently logged in user should be able to be accessed through the current_user. the user who the post belongs to will need to be set in the Posts controller:

@user = Users.find(@post.user_id)

or

@user = @post.user