Why do you not pass a parameter to authlogic's UserSession.find function

Question

To find a user session in authlogic, you call UserSession.find (or whatever you named UserSession). Is the ability to find the correct UserSession without providing a parameter (something like UserSession.find(params['session_id']) a Rails thing or did authlogic overwrite the find functionality?

Answer 1

UserSession isn't an ActiveRecord model. Instead, it inherits from Authlogic::Session::Base. This provides it with methods which are similar to an ORM. The authlogic docs state:

What if creating sessions worked like an ORM library on the surface…

The find method is defined within the authlogic codebase here, which just probes the session store (usually a cookie) to see if the user is logged in.