Comments on: Aegis: Role-based Permissions for your Ruby on Rails application

By: Henning Koch

Henning Koch — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:02:32 +0000

@Dave: When you implement authentication in Rails, it is useful to define a helper method in your ApplicationController that returns the user currently signed in. This method is often called current_user.

My suggestion to Chris was to enhance his current_user method, so it returns a new, unsaved guest user in case no user is signed in for this session.

By: Dave Flynn

Dave Flynn — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:08:26 +0000

@Henning Koch,
can you elaborate a bit on the code you gave to Chris about setting up a guest user:

def find_current_user @current_user = User.find_by_id(session["user_id"]) || User.new(:role_name => “guest”) end

I am using Authlogic but having trouble finding where I should create the temporary guest user

Thanks!

By: Dave Flynn

Dave Flynn — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:53:27 +0000

@Enduras make sure you restart your server after installing the gem, I had the same problem and this resolved it.

By: Guillaume

Guillaume — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:34:52 +0000

Yehaaaaa

Great job, exactly what I needed. Thanks for sharing !

By: Enduras

Enduras — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:11:17 +0000

Hello,
i am completly new to ruby on rails and just experimenting with it at the moment to check if i wanna go future with it, so i am trying out some basics every application need kinda so installed me clearance which is working fine and also found your gem which seems to fit my needs fine, other are either too simple or too complex.
But i just dont get this to work i kinda made the stuff as in the sample but i keep getting all the time
undefined local variable or method `has_role’ for #
I guess its something really simple not mentioned in the guide which isnt a problem for a experienced rails user but for newbs like me.

By: Henning Koch

Henning Koch — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:16:36 +0000

@Brad: Just use the “has_role” directive in the same user model where you set up Devise. Like Clearance and Authlogic, Devise provides a “current_user” getter for your controller on which you can invoke aegis methods like “current_user.may_create_orders?”.

Aegis really doesn’t care which authentication plugin you’re using.

By: Brad

Brad — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:47:17 +0000

I agree, I think one User model with access rules is much better than a model per role. So do you know how this would work with one Devise User model? I’m assuming it’s fine?

By: Henning Koch

Henning Koch — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:44:27 +0000

@Brad: Using devise’s multiple-model-authentication to manage access rules would be rather inconvenient. I don’t think it was meant for fine-grained permission management.

By: Brad

Brad — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:03:53 +0000

Has anyone used this with devise? I’ve started looking at devise and I like the idea of a rack based auth solution. It has roles *kindof* in that you can use authentication with any model you like (admin, user etc) but that’s not ideal for users with multiple roles. I’d be interested to see how this stacks up in devise vs, say, clearance

By: Henning Koch

Henning Koch — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:00:44 +0000

@Yuriy: You should be able to use symbols to refer to roles.

Make sure that the role_name attribute in your user model receives the role name as a string though. ActiveRecord can only store strings since the database has no concept of Ruby symbols.