Not equal to conditional

Can anyone help with this. I have an edit form which works perfectly.

However I am trying to add one final little bit. This will get the user_id from the cookie and then compare it to the user_id from a query. If the two are not equal to each other then I need to redirect them.

However I can't the conditional part to work. Anyone able to point me right?

Code:

---

def edit_article
    if request.post?
      @article = Article.find(params[:id])
      if @article.update_attributes(params[:article])
        redirect_to :action => 'index'
      else
        render :action => 'edit_article'
      end
    else
      @user_id = cookies[:user_id]
      @article = Article.find(params[:id])
      if @article.user_id != @user_id
        render :text => "This is not your article. Unable to edit."
      end
    end
  end

---

Managed to get help elsewhere in the end. Figured I'd put the solution up here. In the end it was something very simple. The user_id from the cookie needed to be an integer to match up. My code now read as like the following.

Code:

---

def edit_article
  if request.post?
      @article = Article.find(params[:id])
      if @article.update_attributes(params[:article])
        redirect_to :action => 'index'
      else
        render :action => 'edit_article'
      end
  else
      @user_id = cookies[:user_id]
      @article = Article.find(params[:id])
      if @article.user_id != @user_id.to_i
        render :text => "This is not your article. Unable to edit."
      end
    end
end

---

Sorry I didn't get here sooner. Yes, anything that comes from a cookie is a string, and strings don't compare with integers (the id column of a table is always an int).

just out of curiosity…*why are you even setting the @user_id variable? Just seems like a bit of extra work to me.

why not just do

Code Ruby:

---

def edit_article
    if request.post?
      @article = Article.find(params[:id])
      if @article.update_attributes(params[:article])
        redirect_to :action => 'index'
      else
        render :action => 'edit_article'
      end
    else
      @article = Article.find(params[:id])
      if @article.user_id != cookies[:user_id].to_i
        render :text => "This is not your article. Unable to edit."
      end
    end
  end

---

not quite sure