Ok, Here''s a rough layout of what I think I can do to make one of those nifty drop down menus while still restricting what certain roles can see. What I want to do is create a data structure that will hold the text of the menu item, the link to which it points, and an array of strings representing the roles that can access the item. This structure would also need to hold a set of child nodes. Doing this, it''s just simple iteration and recursion (and checking of the user''s list of roles, which I''m thinking of storing in session information) to dump out the ul and li elements which will make up the menu. Then I''ll use CSS to style it. This data structure would need to be initialized during application start-up and maintained as long as the site is running. So, my questions are: 1) Is this the right way to go about this? 2) Would I put the code to do this in the application controller and use a global variable? 3) This site isn''t likely to have to scale to multiple servers, so I feel pretty safe putting the list of roles in which a user is a member into a session variable when they are authenticated. 4) What happens if I need to update the site navigation? Do I need to have some way to detect that the file has changed. If so, how and where do I go about it? Thanks in advance, William Gant --------------------------------- Get your own web address for just $1.99/1st yr. We''ll help. Yahoo! Small Business. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---