Authorizing namespaced about cancan HOT 2 CLOSED

I'm guessing the error you are getting is that Admin::Article doesn't exist. Unfortunately there isn't anything that gets passed to Ability which can be used to determine the namespace you're in.

I recommend setting up an in-between controller which all admin controllers can inherit from. This is often a good thing to do with any namespace because it can help refactor out common functionality that exists in the controllers in that namespace.

# in controllers/admin/base_controller.rb
module Admin
  class BaseController < ApplicationController
    # common behavior goes here ...
  end
end

Then use this as the superclass for each of those controllers.

# in controllers/admin/articles_controller.rb
module Admin
  class ArticlesController < BaseController
    # ...
  end
end

Now several possibilities open up, and the one to go with depends on how complex the authorization needs to be in this admin namespace. If all you need to do is verify User.admin? then you may want to skip CanCan altogether and use a before filter to check this.

# in controllers/admin/base_controller.rb
before_filter :verify_admin
private
def verify_admin
  redirect_to root_url unless current_user.admin?
end

There's really no need to use CanCan here because all the behavior is the same. However if you have various levels of admins which needs to access different things then that's a reason to use CanCan. In that case I recommend creating a separate Ability class.

# in models/admin_ability.rb
class AdminAbility
  include CanCan::Ability
  def initialize(user)
    # define admin abilities here ....
  end
end

Then use this AdminAbility for admin controllers.

# in admin/base_controller.rb
def current_ability
  AdminAbility.new(current_user)
end

Does that make sense? I should probably turn this into a wiki page.

from cancan.

Does this:
http://wiki.github.com/ryanb/cancan/authorization-for-namespaced-controllers
not provide a reasonable solution?

from cancan.