declarative authorisation user switching

Question

Has anyone tried to add user role switching using the authlogic/declarative authorisation gems?

My requirement is that a user can have many roles (e.g. Author, Teacher) and can switch role within the application.

I have a two ideas of how I might approach this:

1. Adding another boolean attribute (active), to the user_roles join table
2. Copying the switched role_id into the users table and working off that

I read the declarative authorisation readme and can't see anything that appears to be built in. Any ideas would be appreciated

Answer 1

Just looked back into this today and the solution is easy enough. I went with adding a boolean attribute to my many-to-many user_roles join to avoid duplication. The join now has the following attributes:

id | user_id | role_id | active

The role_symbols method in my user model, which is used to hook in the authorization_rules.rb DSL now looks like:

def role_symbols
  user_roles.where(:active => true).map do |user_role|
    user_role.role.name.underscore.to_sym
  end
end

Now a users role sets itself to which ever role has active true in the user_roles table.

User switching is easy too (from the user model)

def self.set_active_role(user_id, role_id)
  UserRole.where(:user_id => user_id).update_all(:active => false)

  activate_role = UserRole.where(:user_id => user_id, :role_id => role_id).first
  activate_role.update_attributes(:active => true)
end

Thought it might help someone in the future