I was excited to finally make my first application, I been waiting for this moment for years! I had a lot of ideas of things that could be automated, I decided to create an Open House application because of a personal need: as new real estate agent, during Open house, I had to make guests sign, in order to build my pipeline of future clients. However for practical reasons, my tools were limited, I had the choice between a tablet/phone and a signing sheet, I quickly give up on the signing sheet when I realized that I wasn’t able to read people’s writing, most of the time.
Therefore I used a free application that I found on the app store , unfortunately, it did not have all the labels and forms that I needed, the application had a lot of bugs, I was surprised to not be able to found a better free resource on the market yet…
When I found out that I had to create an app using Sinatra gem I thought of finally making my open house signing sheet MVC,that stand for Models, view, crontroller.
althought I enjoyed this project, I had different challenges to secure the data:
My application follow basic functions of a persistent storage “CRUD,” so a User can create, read, update and delete a guest only if he created the guest, I did this with the help of the associations in my guest and user models and methods in my Controllers:
a Guest “belongs_to :user”
a User “has_many :guests”
Also I want to restrict the acces to a particular guest, so only the user that built the guest could be able to use CRUD, in order to do that I had the method below to my edit and delete methods:
if current_user.id == @guest.user_id
Also I created and secure the session in my ApplicationController
enable :sessions set :session_secret, ‘secret’
finally the user need to be login, I used an helper method that I had to my ApplicationController from where my GuestsController and UsersController will inherite.
helpers do
def logged_in?
!!session[:user_id]
end end
I really enjoyed making this app and play around with CSS /HTML, it was a lot of trial and errors to figure the routes and appropriate verb; overall it is a great experience and I can’t wait to work on more projects.