How to get devise to work with multiple models or roles? (Preferably with CanCan and rolify)

Question

Using devise, what is the best way to have multiple models or roles? Here are the models or roles I need in my app:

-Author: can upload content to the site
-Cust         


        

Answer 1

From your question, I understand you've already "dived" into rolify and cancan, so I'll focus on assigning roles.

You typically create different roles in your seeds.rb file, with something like

[:admin, :author, :customer].each do |role|
  Role.find_or_create_by_name({ name: role }, without_protection: true)
end

You assign the :admin role immediately when you create yourself as administrator, also in the seeds.rb file, using

user.add_role :admin

For your other roles, you assign them "when it's appropriate", exactly as you describe. When a user clicks the Authors link, and proceeds, this triggers some action in some controller. It is there that you assign this role to that user, by using the same

user.add_role :author

You can also assign roles, connected to certain objects only. E.g. an author is author for only the documents he creates himself. In that case you don't want to assign a "general" author role, but you will assign it like

user.add_role :author, document

in the controller's create action, together with saving the created document. Alternative for this kind of assignment is to do it in a callback from your model.

More questions? Just ask!