Access details about abilities programmatically, for generating documentation?

[denis-haskin-elemental]

We'd like to generate some human-readable documentation on the permissions that are captured in our ability definitions.

At the high level this seems pretty straightforward, looks like we can do

Ability.new(User.get_a_user_with_a_specific_role).permissions

.permissions gives us a big hash that we could mung into a spreadsheet of can+cannot, e.g.

{:can=>
  {:create=>
    {"Thingy"=>[],
     "Dingbat"=>[],
...etc...},
  {:edit=>
    {"Thingy"=>[],
...etc...

Is there a way to get to the conditions defined, though?

For example, if we have an ability something like

    can [:lock, :unlock],
        User, {
          role: UserRoles::ADMIN_OR_LESS,
          customers: { id: user_customer_ids }
        }

(basically, ability to lock/unlock a User with one of those roles, within the same customer)

Is there any way from the Ability.new object to get to the condition expressed in the can statement?

[denis-haskin-elemental]

Okay, I tweaked lib/cancan/ability/rules.rb locally to make the rules method public, looks like that likely gives me what I was looking for. Although it still may be tricky to use the condition and express it, programmatically. We may have to just indicate there's a condition here and fill it in by hand. Hmm.