Question

What I’m trying to do is set role to “user” for all users, but I haven’t used the console or Ruby much, which should be clear from the way I’m trying to use them below.

I had hoped something like this would work:

u=User.all
u.role.name="user"

But, clearly, that’s not working and I’m not sure how to proceed.

I’m using CanCan with an ability model and setting the role name by a “name” column in roles. users have many roles through assignments

user.rb

has_many :assignments
has_many :roles, :through => :assignments

Here’s how everything is set up:

assignment.rb

class Assignment < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :role
end

ability.rb

class Ability
  include CanCan::Ability

  def initialize(user)
    user ||= User.new # in case of guest
    if user.has_role? :admin
      can :manage, :all
    #else
     # can :read, :all
  end
  end
end

role.rb

class Role < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :name
  has_and_belongs_to_many :users, :join_table => :users_roles
  belongs_to :resource, :polymorphic => true
end

roles schema

  # == Schema Information
  #
  # Table name: roles
  #
  #  id            :integer         not null, primary key
  #  name          :string(255)
  #  resource_id   :integer
  #  resource_type :string(255)
  #  created_at    :datetime        not null
  #  updated_at    :datetime        not null
  #

Can you let me know how I would set the role name for all users using console?

Answer 1

Use update_all:

role = Role.find_by_name 'user'
User.update_all :role => role

However, update_all will not trigger ActiveRecord callbacks, so if you need those you instead need to iterate over all users:

role = Role.find_by_name 'user'
User.find_each do |user|
  user.role = role
  user.save
end

User.find_each loads users in batches to minimize memory usage if you have more than 1000 users.