Scoping

Scoping is a complementary consideration to authorization. Rather than checking “can this user see this thing?”, scoping takes a list of items filters it to the subset which is appropriate for the current viewer and context.

For similar features, see Pundit scopes and Cancan’s .accessible_by.

scope: option

Fields accept a scope: option to enable (or disable) scoping, for example:

field :products, [Types::Product], scope: true
# Or
field :all_products, [Types::Product], scope: false

For list and connection fields, scope: true is the default. For all other fields, scope: false is the default. You can override this by using the scope: option.

.scope_items(items, ctx) method

Type classes may implement .scope_items(items, ctx). This method is called when a field has scope: true. For example,

field :products, [Types::Product] # has `scope: true` by default

Will call:

class Types::Product < Types::BaseObject
  def self.scope_items(items, context)
    # filter items here
  end
end

The method should return a new list with only the appropriate items for the current context.

Bypassing object-level authorization

If you know that any items returned from .scope_items should be visible to the current client, you can skip the normal .authorized?(obj, ctx) checks by configuring reauthorize_scoped_objects(false) in your type definition. For example:

class Types::Product < Types::BaseObject
  # Check that singly-loaded objects are visible to the current viewer
  def self.authorized?(object, context)
    object.visible_to?(context[:viewer])
  end

  # Filter any list to only include objects that are visible to the current viewer
  def self.scope_items(items, context)
    items.visible_for(context[:viewer])
  end

  # If an object of this type was returned from `.scope_items`,
  # don't call `.authorized?` with it.
  reauthorize_scoped_objects(false)
end