Question

I am working on a Ruby on Rails 3 web application.

I have a table named User with a coulmn named role. I am looking for the best way to hide parts of the view from users that have the “wrong” role for those parts of the view.

For example I want all users to be able to see the users index page, but i want only users with a role – admin to be able to edit other users.

So first I block the edit action using filter_by, but what I also want is make the edit button not to appear.

The current user is saved in the session, so checking the user role is very simple.

What I am asking, is there an easy way to do so besides the obvious if statement before each button I want to hide. I would think that rails would have an easy way to do this type of thing, I couldn’t find one.

Answer 1

if you wanted to clean it up a tiny bit you could write yourself an application helper:

  def if_admin(user)
    if(user.is_admin? && block_given?)
      yield
      return
    end
  end

then in your view you could write:

  <% if_admin(@user) do %>
    <some admin only html />
  <% end %>