Question

I am creating a Rails application that is a blogging platform, with many contributing writers. My User model has a :writer boolean attribute to indicate whether or not a particular user has permission to publish an article. In order to prevent mass assignment, the :writer attribute is NOT listed under attr_accessible for the User model. Instead, I thought of creating a function similar to the following, to allow for toggling of the writer-permissions:

def toggle_writer    
  if User.find(:id).writer?
    User.find(:id).update_attribute(:writer, false)
  else
    User.find(:id).update_attribute(:writer, true)
  end
  flash[:success] = "User permissions toggled."
  redirect_to admintools_users_path
end

I have several questions regarding this approach, though:

1. How would I invoke this from a view? Is there a way to invoke a function via a link_to or button_for?
2. Where would I put such a function? In a controller, or helper?
3. Would I need to edit any routes in the config/routes.rb file?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

1. Yes you can.
2. Better if you put it in the users_controller.

3. Yes, you would. As this action is going to update a single user, so, you should do the following in routes.rb:

    resources :users do
      member do #this means you are doing with a certain object
        get :toggle_writer, :as => :toggle_writer_for # this line will generate toggle_writer_for_user_path route
      end
    end
   

Now you can use this route with link_to, like link_to("Toggle writer", toggle_writer_for_user_path(@user)), where @user is you can get from params[:id].