Hash conditions containing symbols problem

[Silex]

Hello,

I found this blog post that explain the problem I'm having:

http://www.tigraine.at/2014/03/13/cancan-beware-of-symbol-conditions

Basically, if you look at the following rules:

can :manage, Item, user: { role: :admin }  #1
can :manage, Item, user: { role: 'admin' } #2

With both rules Item.accessible_by(current_ability) will return the correct results. But only the 2nd rule will work with can? :manage, Item.accessible_by(current_ability).first

This is because the symbols are not translated to a string the usual way rails does.

Not sure if really a bug or a not.

[EDIT] I believe this is a bug, just because of the unexpected behavior.

[Tigraine]

I believe this to be a bug, at least it's something new users will surely trip over and I can't think of a good and valid use case for wanting that behavior (since it does work differently on ActiveRecord queries)

[vendethiel]

That's how ActiveRecord behaves.

User.where(role: :admin)

[bryanrite]

I agree, this should probably be fixed.

[freemanoid]

I think this is not a bug. There is a similar issue in Squeel gem.
There is a note in rails docs:

The values cannot be symbols. For example, you cannot do Client.where(status: :active).

Thus it's not a bug, actually it's just a trick that you can sometimes use symbols as values.
Related issue: activerecord-hackery/squeel#67