HTTP status exception

This simple plugin will register exception classes for all HTTP status. These exceptions can then be raised from your controllers, after which a response will be send back to the client with the desired HTTP status, possible with some other content.

You can use this plugin to access control mechanisms. You can simply raise a HTTPStatus::Forbidden if a user is not allowed to perform a certain action. A nice looking error page will be the result. See the example below

See the project wiki (github.com/wvanbergen/http_status_exceptions/wikis) for additional documentation.

Installation

Installation is simple. Simply add the gem in your environment.rb:

  Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
    ...
    config.gem 'wvanbergen-http_status_exceptions', :lib => 'http_status_exceptions', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'
  end

Run rake gems:install to install the gem if needed.

Usage

  class BlogController < ApplicationController

    def destroy
      raise HTTPStatus::Forbidden, 'You cannot delete blogs!' unless current_user.can_delete_blogs?
      @blog.destroy
    end
  end

By default, this will return an empty response with the "forbidden" status code (403). If you want to add content to the response as well, create the following view: shared/http_status/forbidden.html.erb. You can use the @exception-object in your view:

  <h1>Forbidden</h1>
  <p> <%= h(@exception.message) %> </p>
  <hr />
  <p>HTTP status code <small> <%= @exception.status_code %>: <%= @exception.status.to_s.humanize %></small></p>

The response will only be sent if the request format is HTML because of the name of the view file. In theory you could make a response for XML requests as well by using shared/http_status/forbidden.xml.builder as filename