Ruby on Rails - CanCan Gem with Many to Many Through

Question

On Rails 4. I'm having trouble understanding how to authorize users to be able to edit their organization's information through CanCan.

Use Case 1: Users have many organizations; organizations have many users. This relationship information is stored in the third model, UserOrganization (with :user_id and :organization_id attributes). So basically, users are able to edit org info as long as they are linked through that third model. I learned about this piece of code but it does not work (in ability.rb):

def initialize(user)
  can [:show, :edit, :update], Organization, user_organizations: { user_id: user.id }
end

(says undefined method user_id)

Use Case 2: There is a fourth model, OrganizationDetails. One organization can have many organization_details. I would also like the user to be able to edit his/her organization's details.

In other words, Users -> has many -> UserOrganizations -> belongs to -> Organizations -> has many -> OrganizationDetails.

How do I format this in CanCan so a user can create/edit those org details he/she is linked to through the UserOrganization model. Thanks. All controllers have load_and_authorize_resource and the appropriate has_many and belongs_to code in the models.

Answer 1

Figured out how to do this.

To restrict by Organization:

can [:show, :edit, :update], Organization do |organization|
  UserOrganization.where(user_id: user.id, organization_id: organization.id).any?
end

To restrict by OrganizationDetail

can [:show, :edit, :update], OrganizationDetail do |organization_detail|
  UserOrganization.where(user_id: user.id, organization_id: organization_detail.organization.id).any?
end