Admin user administration with Devise - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am trying out Devise for the first time. One of the things that I wanted to do is provide an interface for Admin users to create, find and edit users. Here's where I may have gone wrong.
I created a PeopleController class which inherits from ApplicationController that lists people and provides methods and views for creating and updating users. Everything works fine with one exception. When the admin user updates their own record, the session is cleared and they have to login again after saving it.
In this application I'm not using the registerable module. Only an admin user can create new users. What is the right way in devise to provide user management tools. Creating my own controller seems to have been the wrong path to take.
Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Thank you very much for the help. This is essentially exactly what I am doing. I discovered a clue that helped me solve the problem of the user's session being cleared when they edit their own record in this wiki:
https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/wiki/How-To:-Allow-users-to-edit-their-account-without-providing-a-password
This is the line I needed:
sign_in resource_name, resource, :bypass => true
This method is located in Devise::Controllers::Helpers so I did this in my controller.
class PeopleController < ApplicationController
include Devise::Controllers::Helpers
Then in my update method I call it only if the current_user.id equals the id that is being edited:
def update
#person = User.find(params[:id])
if #person.update_attributes(params[:user])
sign_in #person, :bypass => true if current_user.id == #person.id
redirect_to person_path(#person), :notice => "Successfully updated user."
else
render :action => 'edit'
end
end
Now if the current user edits their own record, the session is restored after it is saved.
Thanks again for your responses.

Answer 2

This is how I manage users in one of my apps. I have only one User class generated with
rails g devise User
to which I added a role column with this migration:
class AddRoleToUser < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
add_column :users, :role, :string, :default => "client"
end
end
and my User model:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
# Include default devise modules. Others available are:
# :token_authenticatable, :confirmable, :lockable and :timeoutable
devise :database_authenticatable, :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable
# Setup accessible (or protected) attributes for your model
attr_accessible :email, :password, :password_confirmation, :remember_me
def admin?
self.role == "admin"
end
end
Then to create new users all you would have to do is provide a custom method in a controller (maybe even subclass Devise::RegistrationsController) like this:
# some_controller.rb
def custom_create_user
if current_user.admin?
User.create(:email => params[:email], password => params[:password])
redirect_to(some_path, :notice => 'sucessfully updated user.')
else
redirect_to(some_other_path, :notice => 'You are not authorized to do this.')
end
end