Rails 3 Dynamic User Roles/Access Levels

Question

I'm developing an application that will be used by teachers to manage student assignments and submissions. However, different schools have different standards for assignment submissions, grades, what students should and shouldn't be able to do. As such, I was looking to implement some flexible role management functionality into my application so that the teachers can decide exactly what privileges the user should and shouldn't be able to perform.

One quick solution to this might be to simply add some boolean fields to my User model that the teachers can manipulate by way of check-boxes and run a before_filter on the pertinent controller actions. Alternatively I could move the role definitions to a separate model belonging to the teachers and run the before_filter on that.

Before I try to implement either of those solutions I was wondering if there were any gems or plug-ins that already handle flexible user-managed role definitions?

Just as a side-note I'm using Devise for my authentication if that means anything.

Answer 1

I found this gem quite useful. https://github.com/EppO/rolify
And it has a way of easy integration with Devise and CanCan https://github.com/EppO/rolify/wiki/Tutorial