Should implicit_authorization_target be a public method?

[brendon]

I noticed that implicit_authorization_target is a public method in action_policy on the controller.

Does it need to be public? It feels a bit wrong to have it as a public method on my controllers as that's the convention to use for declaring controller actions (though that's just a hangup from early Rails where public methods were inherently actions on controllers - not the case anymore with restful routes).

What are your thoughts @palkan?

[palkan]

Does it need to be public?

Not necessary; we only use it in the context of self, so it could be private as well.

The reason why it's public now is that we add via including a module; and dealing with visibility in that case (i.e., adding private :method in included) introduces unnecessary complexity to the source code.

[brendon]

Thanks @palkan.

I notice you're using extend ActiveSupport::Concern. My understanding of that is that any instance methods declared beneath private in this module will be private on the including controller: https://stackoverflow.com/a/33768314/129798

So you could just do:

private

def implicit_authorization_target
  controller_name.classify.safe_constantize
end