Rails 3 in Action

Chapter 8. More authorization

This chapter covers

• Expanding with a more advanced system
• Setting permissions to control user actions
• Implementing a seed of data for the app

At the end of chapter 7, you learned a basic form of authorization based on a boolean field on the users table called admin. If this field is set to true, identifying admin users, those users can access the CRUD functions of the Project resource as well as an admin namespace where they can perform CRUD on the User resource.

In this chapter, we expand on authorization options by implementing a broader authorization system using a Permission model. The records for this model’s table define the actions specified users can take on objects from your system, such as projects. ...