> I am new to Rails and wanted to ask some of the veterans here what
> they recommend for Role based permissions.
It depends on a number of factors. If this is a "real thing" for
work, or that you intend to put out for public use, definitely just go
with CanCan. (Or possibly one of the alternatives. CanCan does seem
to be the most popular though.)
On the other claw, if you're just playing, do it with CanCan (or,
again, some alternative) the *first* time. That way, you get the idea
how that sort of thing generally works. *After* that, though, it can
be quite a good learning experience to try to duplicate the
functionality yourself. Meanwhile, having learned CanCan can't hurt
either. :-) You could separate the authorization checks into some
wrapper class that would, under the hood, initially call CanCan, but
then you can remove CanCan (kick the CanCan?), and see what you have
to do to make the app work again. I suggest having particularly good
test coverage in that piece, so you know you've got it working right.
-Dave
--
Dave Aronson, President, Dave Aronson Software Engineering and Training
Ruby on Rails Freelancing (Northern Virginia, Washington DC, or Remote)
DaveAronson.com, Codosaur.us, Dare2XL.com, & RecruitingRants.com (NEW!)
Specialization is for insects. (Heinlein) - Have Pun, Will Babble! (me)
If it's a terribly simple permissions model, you can roll your own
with a small piece of code like this:
http://erniemiller.org/2008/09/30/easy-role-based-authorization/
...I've used tweaked versions of this in the past.
But if you plan any kind of scaling up, it would probably be best to
stick to a tried and tested public gem..
Regards,
Michael