Dear fans and friends of Nitro,
Over the past few days I’ve coded up a reusable part for your (and my)
Nitro applications. It started out as simply user authentication and
access control, but now also includes a crude CSS builder and a brand
new AssetController. It has role based access control and uses a salted
hash for the password.
What does all of this mean?
There are three Og models : UserACL:: User, Permission and Role. A
permission is defined by a string which is either
‘*’ => allow everything
‘ControllerName’ => allow access to all actions of this controller
‘ControllerName/action’ => allow access to this action (all formats)
‘ControllerName/action.format’ => allow access to this action for the
specific format
Roles have permissions and users have roles. To add checks to your
controllers you simply do
class SomeController < Nitro::Controller #Necessary to have :authorize
available
authorize :delete, :create, :update
end
If the current user isn’t authorized he gets redirected to the referrer
or home, and an error message is added to the flash.
To set up initial permissions you can use UserACL.init, e.g.
UserACL.init do
role 'admin', 'Administrators have full access' do
user 'admin', 'Mister Admin', 'padmin'
grant '*'
end
end if UserACL::User.all.empty?
The element will render a box where one can log in, and a
link to the sign-up page.
The provided element works together with the asset
controller. These allow elements within the page to define class methods
render_css and render_js. The result will be served as if it’s a
seperate css/js file by the AssetController, and the will make
sure the right <link …> tag is added to your HTML.
And to top it off you can use the CSSBuilder (which does lack maturity)
to do something like
css {
p {
a {
font_family :serif
}
}
klass(:emphasis) {
font_weight :bold
}
id(:useracl_loginbox) {
font_family "sans-serif"
float:right
div {
margin "3px"
}
}
The main advantage is that you can nest blocks.
Oh and be sure to check out the element!
To get the goods a simple
svn co http://code.arnebrasseur.net/useracl
should suffice.
Have fun,
(ab)
–
Arne B.
http://www.arnebrasseur.net
http://www.zhongwiki.com
http://www.bankske.org
[email protected]
Many thanks for