Allow to ignore arguments

[dnagir]

I often write permission checks that do not need to accept any arguments:

class UserAccess < DefaultAccess

  def sign_in?(user_klass)
    current_user.present?
  end

end

which is executed from controller as:

authorize! :sign_in, User

It would be good if we could rewrite the sign_in? signature without user_klass argument that is not used.

[thomasfedb]

Does this effectively involve squashing the argument to the permission check if the second argument to authorize! is a model rather than a record?

Perhaps it would be best to allow developers to define a self.sign_in? which is called without arguments in these scenarios.

[dnagir]

That sounds like a good option.
Buuut it would be useless in the scenario described here because class method would have no "context" (e.g. no current_user).

Thus, useless for anything other than static return values.

[thomasfedb]

Perhaps better to just permit access methods to be parameter-less, and then let the developer handle things in more complicated cases.

I'm pretty sure this can be implemented with Method#arity. Shall I do that?

[dnagir]

I'm not sure I want to complicate it really with arity. We may use it this way:

authorize! :sign_in, User, 'public_site'

def sign_in?(site_area)
  # ...
end
``


So I can't justify the complexity for the little advantage of not having 'ignored arguments'.
Those ignores can be written as below to clearly indicate it:

def sign_in?(_)
end

So I'm hesitant to change it until a good solution will be found.

The simplicity of this gem is my primary aim and this issue isn't particularly of any high importance for me personally. I also haven't seen it requested as a real-world issue either.

[thomasfedb]

I'm perfectly happy with using underscores. Was mostly just wondering if you had wanted some changes done, given that you had an open issue.