Welcome to the Cookbook

Now that we have our users and groups (aros), we can begin inputting our existing controllers into the Acl and setting permissions for our groups and users, as well as enabling login / logout.

Our AROs are automatically creating themselves when new users and groups are created. What about a way to auto-generate ACOs from our controllers and their actions? Well unfortunately there is no magic way in CakePHP's core to accomplish this. The core classes offer a few ways to manually create ACO's though. You can create ACO objects from the Acl shell or You can use the AclComponent. Creating Acos from the shell looks like:

cake acl create aco root controllers

While using the AclComponent would look like:

$this->Acl->Aco->create(array('parent_id' => null, 'alias' => 'controllers'));
$this->Acl->Aco->save();

1. $this->Acl->Aco->create(array('parent_id' => null, 'alias' => 'controllers'));
2. $this->Acl->Aco->save();

Both of these examples would create our 'root' or top level ACO which is going to be called 'controllers'. The purpose of this root node is to make it easy to allow/deny access on a global application scope, and allow the use of the Acl for purposes not related to controllers/actions such as checking model record permissions. As we will be using a global root ACO we need to make a small modification to our AuthComponent configuration. AuthComponent needs to know about the existence of this root node, so that when making ACL checks it can use the correct node path when looking up controllers/actions. In AppController add the following to the beforeFilter:

$this->Auth->actionPath = 'controllers/';

1. $this->Auth->actionPath = 'controllers/';