Summary

Converts silent nil returns from find_by to find_by! in before_action callbacks, causing Rails to return a proper 404 response instead of a 500 error when invalid tokens are accessed.

Problem

In production, users visiting /invitations/:token with invalid tokens were seeing:

NoMethodError: undefined method 'member' for nil

This happened because:

1. InvitationController#show uses @invitation.member on line 5
2. The @invitation variable was set by a before_action using find_by(token: ...)
3. find_by returns nil when no record matches (instead of raising an exception)
4. Calling .member on nil causes NoMethodError

Root Cause Analysis

The issue was identified in app/controllers/concerns/workshop_invitation_concerns.rb:25-27:

def set_invitation
  @invitation = WorkshopInvitation.find_by(token: token)  # Returns nil if not found
end

This pattern existed in 9 locations across the codebase, using find_by instead of find_by! for token/slug lookups in before_action callbacks.

Solution

Changed find_by to find_by! in all 9 locations. The find_by! method raises ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound when no record is found, which Rails automatically converts to a 404 response.

Files Changed

Testing

All controller tests pass. Note: Some pre-existing test failures exist in the codebase (related to 'twitter' attribute on Member model), but these are unrelated to this fix.

Impact

• Before: Invalid tokens caused 500 errors (NoMethodError)
• After: Invalid tokens return 404 Not Found

This is more user-friendly and follows REST conventions - an invalid token represents a resource that doesn't exist, not a server error.

Audit Notes

A broader audit of the codebase was performed to identify similar patterns. All find_by calls in before_action callbacks that could cause nil-related crashes have been addressed.