Comments on: Uploading multiple files with progress indicator using jQuery, Flash and Rails

By: Casper Fabricius

Casper Fabricius — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:32:15 +0000

Hi Brandon,

Thank you for your comments – and don’t worry about the design of the blog ;)

I don’t mention it in the article, but that code was made a Rails 2.1.2-based project. There has been made significant changes to how sessions work in Rails 2.3.2, so that’s probably what gave you trouble. I’m glad to hear you still got it working, though – I’ll soon need to use this technique on a 2.3.2 project myself, and I’ll post a followup if I run into the same trouble.

By: Brandon Mechtley

Brandon Mechtley — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:22:31 +0000

I probably should have thought about this before posting–that’s my entire session, and as I’m storing a great deal extra information in it, I guess it’s important to send the whole thing.

By: Brandon Mechtley

Brandon Mechtley — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:01:28 +0000

Woops. Sorry for destroying the format of your pristine blog with that string :)

By: Brandon Mechtley

Brandon Mechtley — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:59:02 +0000

Thanks for this! Your method, combined with Rob Anderton’s post using a custom Rack middleware worked out great.

Unfortunately, I’m not exactly sure why, but I had a couple problems (Rails 2.3.2), the first being that I needed to replace Rails.configuration.action_controller.session[:session_key] with ActionController::Base.session_options[:key] (Rails complained that the first session variable was nil), and the second being that I have some discrepancies in my session IDs from session.session_id.

session.session_id gives me an ID something like “2d1c06c075ecd8d7e3d8e2adf2371f06,” which seems reasonable, since as far as I know session IDs are supposed to be 32-byte hashes, but the actual session IDs I get from working form posts are more like, “BAh7CToMdXNlcl9pZGkGOg9zZXNzaW9uX2lkIiUyZDFjMDZjMDc1ZWNkOGQ3ZTNkOGUyYWRmMjM3MWYwNjoQX2NzcmZfdG9rZW4iMWdYRGQ0U29SU1k2NGJuOEY1MWZ6S1U3ZW1ZL0hPR09lVU0wTVUvQWQwbzQ9IgpmbGFzaElDOidBY3Rpb25Db250cm9sbGVyOjpGbGFzaDo6Rmxhc2hIYXNoewAGOgpAdXNlZHsA–e96c3614fb16e404a2e1cbcbaf7a401d97883bbf”

I really don’t have any clue why this happens, as I’m pretty new to Rails, but I was able to fix the problem by using request.cookies[ActionController::Base.session_options[:key]] instead of session.session_id.

Hope this helps anyone having a similar problem.

By: pn

pn — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:27:53 +0000

@Did
i have the same problem.
i use CGI.escape for convert authenticity_token
it’s work very well when you have a ‘+’ in your token

By: Did

Did — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:53:03 +0000

Thanks Casper, I took a look at the action script code and I saw a call to the “unescape” method on the scriptData variable (used by the uploadify query). Perhaps, they changed it for the current reelase. So, next step: remove this call and re-compile the flash component.

By: Casper Fabricius

Casper Fabricius — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:14:51 +0000

I actually think I have – I just don’t remember what I did about it, to be honest. It works for me with the above solution, though.

By: Did

Did — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:13:29 +0000

Nice article, thanks for your work !
Unfortunately, I came through a weird bug with “special” characters (such as ‘+’) in the form authenticity token. On the server side, when I get the token, ‘+’ characters for instance are removed. I’m pretty sure it’s caused by the flash component since I use encodeURIComponent.
Have you met this bug before ?

By: Narendra

Narendra — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:55:37 +0000

how to upload multiple files at a time.

By: Casper Fabricius

Casper Fabricius — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:10:25 +0000

Thanks Lars – this looks really cool. Looks like we are going to have to update Lokalebasen.dk to Rails 2.3 soon ;)