Use model other than User for clearance authentication in rails application

Question

I have a rails application which uses clearance and cancan gems for authentication and authorization. Initially, the application used User model as the user_model to be used by Clearance. Now, because of some design changes, we want to have another model class Person to be used as a user_model by Clearance. The Person model is already in place and has columns specific to Person model in the context of the application.

Rails version: 3.2.14
Ruby version: 1.9.3-p487
Clearance version: 0.16.3

To achieve this, we have done following changes:

1. Migrated fields (email, encrypted_password, remember_token, salt, confirmation_token) required by Clearance from User model to Person model.
2. Made the Person model include Clearance::User

3. Changed the Clearance initializer to set *user_model = Person* as suggested in http://rubydoc.info/github/thoughtbot/clearance/frames

   Clearance.configure do |config|
     config.user_model = Person
   end
   

4. Updated factory definition for Person model as follows:

   FactoryGirl.define do
     sequence(:email) {|n| "user#{n}@example.com" }
     factory :person do
       ignore do
         group nil
       end
       email
       password { "password" }
       company
       first_name { FactoryGirl.generate(:name).capitalize }
       last_name  "Test"
       groups { [group || FactoryGirl.create(:group)] }
     end
   end
   

After these changes, when I run specs related to persons, it is not able to create the person object using the factory. I get following issue.

    1) Person 
       Failure/Error: it { should validate_presence_of(:first_name) }
       NameError: undefined local variable or method `encrypted_password' for #<Person:0x00000001e7bcc8>
       # ./spec/models/person_spec.rb:8:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'

I referred the documentation, topics on google groups for clearance group, forum posts but couldn't resolve the issue. Has anyone done similar? Can you please help me resolve this issue?

Answer 1

It looks like your Person class does not have the encrypted_password column. Be sure it has this, and also the fields below

t.string :email
t.string :encrypted_password, :limit => 128
t.string :confirmation_token, :limit => 128
t.string :remember_token, :limit => 128

If you post your schema.rb or person.rb file this can be confirmed.