using exhibits for dashboard design

[Patrick Mulder]

Hello,

what are your thoughts on organizing exhibits for the design of an
information dashboard that respond to different roles in an
application?

Let's say in the blog application you are going to work with writers
and photographers who could contribute in your blog. Besides providing
a dashboard to a writer and to a photographer, you have a kind of
superuser-admin, who could edit and publish all content.

How would this influence the design of exhibits (display cases)?

/app/exhibits/dashboard_exhibits.rb
---> the logic what to display to different roles?

/app/views/dashboard/
----> the templates for different roles, such as
_photographer.rb or _writer.rb or _superadmin.rb


Is this in the line of the exhibit pattern?

Thanks for eventual feedback,

best regards,

patrick

PS I think in Rails, this is classically done with the help of CanCan
- however CanCan looks a bit like introducing quit some coupling.
Eventually, you have feedback if/how CanCan is a good solution for
dashboard design for different roles?

PPS what about another name for the exhibit pattern, namely
"moderator" - in a TV or radio show, it's actually the moderator who
decides what direction the show (or content) takes, and what's not
shown.

[Avdi Grimm]

Seems reasonable. One thing I might do is identify which parts of the page and which data collections change based on role, and make sure there was a method corresponding to each change-able part. E.g. #posts could be implemented to return a different subset of posts for each role exhibit, and #render_recent_post_summary (just an example) might also render a different partial for different roles.

--
Avdi Grimm
http://avdi.org