Upgrading to 1.5

This document explains what's new in CanCan 1.5. If you are just getting started with CanCan, first check out the README.

See Upgrading to 1.4 if you are using version 1.3 or older. Also check out the CHANGELOG for the full list of changes.

Ability Generator

A Rails 3 generator has been added for creating the Ability class when starting out with CanCan. After adding and installing the cancan gem, run the generator with this command.

rails g cancan:ability

Comments are included in the generated file with more information on using the Ability class.

Mongoid and DataMapper Support

There is improved support with Mongoid and DataMapper. They now work with Fetching Records. This also means you can use their query syntax in the can hash conditions.

# in Ability
can :read, Article, :priority.lt => 5

CanCan will handle this behavior automatically, just be certain to add the Mongoid or DataMapper gem before CanCan in the Gemfile.

A great way to contribute to CanCan is to create a model adapter for other ORMs. See mongoid_adapter.rb for an example. Specs should also be included. See spec/README for running specs for specific adapters.

Thank you bowsersenior for the Mongoid behavior and natemueller for the DataMapper behavior.

Skip Loading and Authorizing

Three new methods have been added to the controller: skip_load_and_authorize_resource, skip_load_resource, and skip_authorize_resource. Each of these can be used to skip either the loading or authorization behavior in CanCan. You can pass :only or :except option to either one to specify which actions to skip. For example.

class ProjectsController < ApplicationController
  load_and_authorize_resource
  skip_load_resource :only => :index
end

You can optionally pass the name of the resource as the first argument just like you can in load_and_authorize_resource.

Special thanks to everyone who helped contribute to this release. See the issue tracker for the history.