E1915 Authorization Utilities

E1915. Authorization Utilities

This page provides a description of an Expertiza OSS project.

About Expertiza

Expertiza is an open source project based on Ruby on Rails framework. Expertiza allows the instructor to create new assignments and customize new or existing assignments. It also allows the instructor to create a list of topics the students can sign up for. Students can form teams in Expertiza to work on various projects and assignments. Students can also peer review other students' submissions. Expertiza supports submission across various document types, including the URLs and wiki pages.

Problem Statement

The following tasks were accomplished in this project:

Centralize user authentication logic to support the DRY principle
Improve user authentication logic in cases where it was clearly flawed
Support this work with RSpec unit tests

Current Implementation

Functionality

Most controllers contain an action_allowed? method which determines which users are allowed to perform which actions
This logic is in most cases correct, but is often repeated between controllers (un-DRY)
This logic is in some cases slightly incorrect
The Roles model provides a helpful method hasAllPrivilegesOf, which could be used to simplify authorization logic

Drawbacks and Solutions

Problem 1: TODO: add description of problem 1

# TODO: add code demonstrating problem 1

Solution: TODO: add description of solution to problem 1

New Implementation

TODO: add bulleted list of new implementation stuff

  # TODO: add code demonstrating something about each new implementation bullet point

Code improvements

TODO: add bulleted list of code improvements that are not already discussed above

Automated Testing using RSPEC

TODO: describe our strategy for RSPEC testing

  # TODO add terminal command and result for running RSPEC testing on our new code

E1915 Authorization Utilities