NAME Catalyst::Plugin::Authorization::Roles - Role based authorization for Catalyst based on Catalyst::Plugin::Authentication. SYNOPSIS use Catalyst qw/ Authentication Authentication::Store::ThatSupportsRoles Authorization::Roles /; sub delete : Local { my ( $self, $c ) = @_; $c->assert_user_roles( qw/admin/ ); # only admins can delete $c->model("Foo")->delete_it(); } DESCRIPTION Role based access control is very simple: every user has a list of roles, which that user is allowed to assume, and every restricted part of the app makes an assertion about the necessary roles. If the user is a member in all of the required roles access is granted. Otherwise, access is denied. For example, if you have a CRUD application, for every mutating action you probably want to check that the user is allowed to edit. To do this, create an editor role, and add that role to every user who is allowed to edit. sub edit : Local { my ( $self, $c ) = @_; $c->assert_user_roles( qw/editor/ ); $c->model("TheModel")->make_changes(); } When this plugin checks the roles of a user it will first see if the user supports the self check method. When this is not supported the list of roles is extracted from the user using the "roles" method. When this is supported, the "check_roles" method will be used to delegate the role check to the user class. Classes like the one provided with Catalyst::Plugin::Authentication::Store::DBIC optimize the check this way. METHODS assert_user_roles [ $user ], @roles Checks that the user (as supplied by the first argument, or, if omitted, "$c->user") has the specified roles. If for any reason ("$c->user" is not defined, the user is missing a role, etc) the check fails, an error is thrown. You can either catch these errors with an eval, or clean them up in your "end" action. check_user_roles [ $user ], @roles Takes the same args as "assert_user_roles", and performs the same check, but instead of throwing errors returns a boolean value. SEE ALSO Catalyst::Plugin::Authentication AUTHOR Yuval Kogman, "nothingmuch@woobling.org" COPYRIGHT & LICENSE Copyright (c) 2005 the aforementioned authors. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.