Acts as user

Acts as user handles multiple user roles on a rails app. It uses polymorphic associations to relate other models and behave like a user.

Getting started

ActsAsUser 1.2.1 works with rails 3 onwards. You can add it to your Gemfile with:

gem 'acts_as_user'

Then run the bundle command to install it.

After you install ActsAsUser you need to run the generator:

rails g acts_as_user:install

The generator will install in initializer which describes all the ActsAsUser configuration options, so we recommend you take a look at it. When you are done you are ready to start your user model:

rails g acts_as_user User <attributes>

Next you'll probably want to run the migrations "rake db:migrate", as the generator will create a migration file (open it modify if you need to).

Configuration

For the models you want to inherit to you just have to add this line of code into them:

class Member
    acts_as_user
end

A little note on the User model...just in case!

class User
    is_user
end

Ignore attributes to delegate from the user

If you want to ignore some attributes from your user model to the childs, you can do it on the acts_as_user.rb initializer like so:

ActsAsUser.setup do |config|
    config.ignored_attributes = ["name", "bio"]
end

By default it ignores the following attributes:

["created_at", "updated_at", "id", "userable_type", "userable_id"]

Devise support

Yes we do!

Acts as a user plays well with Devise as it ignores and adds the corresponding attributes to delegate to.

When using devise, ActsAsUser will also ignore the encrypted_password attribute from the user. No further configuration needs to be done.

Getting to know the user

ActsAsUser gem now adds some handy instance user methods that returns true or false wheter the current user is a specific type or not, for example:

A simple configuration may look something similar to:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
 is_user
end

class Customer < ActiveRecord::Base
 acts_as_user
end

class Admin < ActiveRecord::Base
 acts_as_user
end

Just a little configuration is needed, you can do it on the acts_as_user.rb initializer like so:

ActsAsUser.setup do |config|
    config.models_acting_as_users = [:admin, :customer]
end

Now we will instantiate a Customer object:

customer = Customer.find(1)
current_user = customer.user

You now should be able to detect in this case if the current_user is wheter an admin or a customer by simply calling:

current_user.customer?
 => true
current_user.admin?
 => false

Enjoy!

Contributing

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request

Psst! Here is a live example in rails

Rails acts as user example

Devs

Abraham Kuri (https://github.com/kurenn)
Patricio Beltrán (https://github.com/patobeltran)

Future

Support for Mongoid
Add wiki

Credits

Icalia Labs - [email protected]

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