Uuuhhh… the title alone sounds funky :)
I want to use polymorphic models for my current app in order to represent the different types of users that the app is handling.
The base model is just a user and inside this model all the log in logic is stored and everything that is shared between all my different user types.
Inspired by cancan I wanted something that would be easy to maintain and easy to setup, therefor I decided to build a simple authentication system which I can then use in my app like this:
Visitor.can?(:view, '/secret/stuff')
and here the Visitor inherits from the User like so Visitor < User and the user is representing the database table in this case.
Inside my Visitor all the permissions are stored in a hash like this:
@permissions = {
:view => ["^/$", "deals", "deal\/[0-9]+$"]
}
as you can see each key is the action and the value is an array of regular expressions. And then in the rails console I tested this like so:
["^/$", "deals", "deal\/[0-9]+$"].collect { |r| "/super/secret".match(r).nil? }
where the path (just a string) being tested is “/super/secret” then the above line of code will return:
[true, true, true]
the path “/super/secret” is not in the array of regular expressions representing the resources a visitor can view. But if I change the path to “/deal/42″ the returned array from the one liner would look like:
[true, true, false]
where false actually tells me that the visitor can view any path looking like “/deal/42″
