Limiting Access of Nested Resources

So I'm using nested routes for a users model that has measurements and journals... like this:

map.resources :users do |users|   users.resources :journals   users.resources :measurements end

This of course builds routes as something like:

/user/:user_id/journals/:id /user/:user_id/measurements/:id

In the case of this application the logged in user is only going to be accessing his or her own resources (journals and measurements). So my question is: What is the proper way to accommodate that in routing so that /user/:user_id isn't necessary and just going to /journals or / journals/:id would ensure that I'm going to the the currently logged in user's journals or measurements? And in turn, what would be the best way of making sure that users can't type /journal/:id and see another users record once that :user_id was trimmed off (they should only be able to see their own).

Thoughts? I greatly appreciate it.

Thanks. Tim K.

I've never done this but I'll give my 2 cents anyway:

1) With nested routes, you are always still looking for the user - you fetch it in the Journals controller and that's where you can evaluate it. What you can do is fetch the current_user unless the current_user is an admin or whatever 2) About the routes I'd like to know that... if you always fetch the current_user it would be possible since you don't pass the user_id in the URL anymore, but admins and such wouldn't be able to see another's journal.

Ramon Tayag

Ramon - Fetching the current_user in the Journals controller doesn't solve the issue, unless I'm misunderstanding you. The current_user is set to in instance variable called @user so @user.id would be equal relationship to grab the journals suchas @journals = @user.journal. The question is really about the routing not about getting the user_id in question. I'm trying to take advantage of the restful routes such as user_journals_path and all that but without the need to have / users/:user_id in the url.

Does anyone have any experience in doing something like this?

Another thought I had would be just being able to replace the / users/:user_id with /profile

then there could be /profile/journals/2 or whatever... but profile would be somehow mapped to the users controller passing the @user as it's default id... am I heading in any form of a sane direction?

Two things:

1) A has_many do not necesseraly mean a nested resource _in your interface_. You can simply configure

   map.resources :journals    map.resources :measurements

2) Access control is implemented via AR finders. In this case you'd do

   def index      @journals = current_user.journals    end

   # before filter    def find_journal      current_user.journals.find(params[:id])    rescue      redirect_to journals_url    end

I see Xavior - that's makes a lot of sense especially with that before_filter. I'll refactor a little bit. Thanks.