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ruby-on-rails-3.2activeadmincancan

ActiveAdmin with CanCanAdapter causing infinite redirect on dashboard

When using the CanCan adapter in ActiveAdmin 0.6.0. I have a resource working and authorization is working. However, when I go to /admin, the root ActiveAdmin page, it redirects to /admin and continues this forever.

Solution

  • If the user does not have access to a page, ActiveAdmin redirects to the Dashboard. If the user doesn't have access to the dashboard, this results in an infinite redirect.

    Solution is to give the user the ability to read the dashboard page. Place this in the ability model object:

    can :read, ActiveAdmin::Page, :name => "Dashboard"

    This is mentioned in the authorization adapter documentation, but the infinite redirect seems to be caused by a bug in ActiveAdmin. It is neither raising a CanCan::AccessDenied, nor displaying an message to the user. At the least, it should display a message in development to help troubleshoot this issue. But it does not currently.