Hi,

I am trying to implement the Safe Erb Plugin in my rails 2.0.2 app. I am using this version for project specific purposes along with Ruby 1.8.7.

I have referred to the following tutorials:

http://www.railslodge.com/plugins/430-safe-erb http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/safe_erb

I could make only some sense of the above Url's as I am a newbie to Rails and Rails related plugins. I honestly also found the above tutorials to be very generic.

I really also couldn't relate this plugin's use to a great extent in terms of real world sense from the above tutorials. Could you please enlighten me on its usage on a day to day real world....?

I have implemented a books appl which has an author, title and publishing date. I am currently facing issues implementing the taint feature of this plugin

In the second tutorial, they say we need to call the tainted? method from the Objects class. I have done this in my create method of my books_controller.rb. The code for the create method looks like this:

def create

@book = Book.new(params[:book])

@book.publishing_date = params[:publishing_date]

respond_to do |format|

  if @book.save
    flash[:notice] = 'Book was successfully created.'
    format.html { redirect_to(@book) }
    format.xml  { render :xml => @book, :status => :created,

:location => @book }

  else
    format.html { render :action => "new" }
    format.xml  { render :xml => @book.errors, :status =>

:unprocessable_entity }

  end

  if @book.tainted?
    flash[:notice] = 'Books are tainted'
    format.html { redirect_to(@book) }
    format.xml  { render :xml => @book, :status => :created,

:location => @book }

  else
    flash[:notice] = 'Books aren\'t tainted'
    format.html { render :action => "new" }
    format.xml  { render :xml => @book.errors, :status =>

:unprocessable_entity }

  end

end

Upon creating a new book record I get a notice saying that "Books aren't tainted". I have copied this plugin into my vendor/plugins directory.

As per the second tutorial url they say "The string becomes tainted when it is read from IO, such as the data read from the DB or HTTP request."

But its not happening in my case when I try to create a new book record. Do I need to explicitly taint the string input I am taking(its currently in varchar as per DB types - I guess that shouldn't be an issue). If yes could you please tell me how to do it.

OR

if its not the above case.. Am I missing something?

Any insights on this would be really appreciated.

Thank you..