Accessing an external table from a Rails application

Rails 3.2

I am using the API gem. What the client wants, is to keep the table where he wants to whitelist the email addresses that can be used to access the API, in a seprate table, that he only can access through phpmyadmin.

This would be a single table:

api_users

With a single column: email (in addition to id, created_at, updated_at)

The email addresses that would go in this table, also exist in the users table for the rails application.

If I create a model: models/api_user.rb:

class ApiUser< ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :email

And, in my models/api_ability.rb, I add the following:

class ApiAbility
  include CanCan::Ability

  def initialize(user, params = {})
    user ||= User.new   
    if ApiUser.find_by_email(user.email)
      can :manage, :api
    end
  end

end

Will this work?

Solution

That sounds absolutely doable. You might want to add something like

def readonly?
  true
end

to the ApiUser class to make sure no one will try to create instances of it from within Rails. But apart from that I don't see any reason not to do it that way given the clients requirements.