Make it easy to track who created/updated your models.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'fingerprints'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install fingerprints

# Widget Schema...
create_table :widgets do |t|
  t.string :name
  t.fingerprints # creates integer fields for created_by and updated_by
end

# User model...
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_fingerprints
end

# Widget model...
class Widget < ActiveRecord::Base
  leaves_fingerprints

  # If your 'user' is really a Person you could do this:
  #
  # leaves_fingerprints :class_name => 'Person'
end

Now, some how, some way you need to set User.fingerprint to either the User instance or User 'id' of the "currently logged in user". One way to do this would be to put this in your controller assuming your controller has a :current_user method that will return the current user.

before_filter { |c| User.fingerprint = c.send(:current_user) }

At this point if you create/update a Widget it will set the created_by/updated_by attributes automatically. You can also do this:

@widget.creator => User instance...
@widget.updator => User instance...

The default :class_name is 'User' and can be overridden like this:

HasFingerprints::OPTIONS.merge!(:class_name => 'Person')

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request