Pundit authorization when 2 user models + admin role

Question

I'm new to Rails and exercising. I have two user models, Student and Prof. I added an admin role to the Student model with enum.

I want to allow a Prof's profile to be edited by the owner of the profile or an admin.

Here is my code in profile_policy.rb:

def update?
 is_owner? || user.admin? if user
end
[...]
def is_owner?
 record.prof == user
end

and in my show view, I want to show the link "edit" only based on the Pundit authorization:

<%= link_to 'Edit', edit_prof_profile_path(@prof.id, @profile.id) if policy(@profile).edit? %>

In my application controller I have a custom current_user method that includes both current_student and current_prof.

The problem is that user.admin? calls the admin method on the Prof model, which doesn't have such method, so I get the error undefined method admin? when a Prof who isn't the owner wants to visit a profile.

How can I fix that?

Answer 1

This is a solution that eventually worked for me, using try()

In my policy file, I add this custom method checking if the user has or not a role defined as "admin. This method will return true or false, as expected by Pundit.

def is_admin?
  user.try(:role) == "admin"
end