A brief note to point out some changes I made to Consent, my access control DSL for Rails. I’ve been doing some Rails development for the first time in a few months and ran into some things that needed changing.

First up, it seems Rails 2.3 uses application_controller.rb rather than application.rb for the root controller and this was breaking Consent’s startup routine; this is now fixed.

Secondly, Consent has for some time provided a feature to let you use request expressions in your routes and controllers, so you could write redirect_to users.login rather than redirect_to :controller => 'users', :action => 'login', for example. This has now been extended so that any controller or view method that expects a URL hash (such as redirect_to, link_to, form_for, etc.) can use request expressions instead. This really helped me clean up some template code earlier and I think I prefer it to named routes. In fact, it’s a bit like getting named routes for free without having to specify them anywhere.

Let me know if either of these cause problems; injecting method_missing so broadly is bound to upset somebody but I’ve not had any problems so far.