Philosophical question about MVC

Hi folks, I am working on Station, a Rails Engine [1] that supports authorization among other things.

Using Station, you can ask a model about authorization, for example:

  post.authorize?(permission, :to => current_user)

My question rises when doing automatic Model - Controller mapping. How coupled should be the action in the controller with the permission authorized in the model?

Consider this resource:

class PostsController   authorization_filter end

This could map the authorization to the post instance this way:

* create   Post.new.authorize?(:create, :to => current_user) * show   Post.find(params[:id]).authorize?(:show, :to => current_user)

I am not sure that the Controller actions should be mapped directly to the Model permissions. There are cases when an action requires several permissions, like:

* edit   Post.find(params[:id]).authorize?(:show, :to => current_user) &&   Post.find(params[:id]).authorize?(:update, :to => current_user)

Maybe this mapping could be declared in the controller, maybe in the model...

Can anyone shed light on this?

[1] http://rstation.wordpress.com

Antonio Tapiador del Dujo wrote:

Hi folks, I am working on Station, a Rails Engine [1] that supports authorization among other things.

Using Station, you can ask a model about authorization, for example:

  post.authorize?(permission, :to => current_user)

My question rises when doing automatic Model - Controller mapping. How coupled should be the action in the controller with the permission authorized in the model?

Philosophically, I agree with Ryan Bates' approach in CanCan, which is to decouple authorization from everything, including all three layer of MVC.

I say "philosophically" since I have not add the opportunity to implement CanCan in any of my projects yet.

Very interesting solution. And pretty similar to Station, btw.

Many thanks for the link Robert!