A Created Frame Asks the Host Who Owns It

Context

ADR 014 gave a frame a nullable polymorphic owner purely so a host’s Pundit scope has a column to filter on, and said Janela never interprets it. That was right while frames were only created in a console or a seed, where whoever created one could set it.

Build 4 lets an analyst create a frame through the engine’s own form, and the gap becomes a fault: Janela writes the row, so Janela decides the owner, and it has nothing to decide with. A frame saved with no owner is hidden by the very scope meant to find it, so the analyst creates a dashboard and it disappears. That failure has already happened twice in this project by other routes, once in a test and once on the live demo, which is how confidently it can be predicted here.

Three ways out. A configuration setting naming the owner. The engine not creating frames at all, leaving it to each host, which defeats the purpose of build 4 since the analyst is the person who cannot deploy. Or asking the host at the moment of writing.

Decision

If the host’s controller responds to janela_frame_owner, the engine assigns its return value as the owner of a frame it creates.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  private
    def janela_frame_owner
      Current.account
    end
end

A host that defines nothing gets a nil owner, which is correct for a single tenant application and is what the demo did before it had tenancy at all.

This is the pattern policy_scope already established (ADR 004): Janela asks the host’s controller a question by duck typing, and takes silence as an answer rather than requiring configuration. It keeps Janela’s settings at one, parent_controller, and it puts the decision in the only place that can make it, inside a request where the current user and tenant exist.

Janela still never interprets the owner. It assigns what it is handed and reads nothing from it. Scoping remains entirely the host’s policy, exactly as ADR 014 said.

Consequences

• An analyst can create a dashboard and see it, which is the whole point of build 4 and was impossible without this.
• A multi tenant host that forgets to define the method gets frames nobody can see. That is a quiet failure, so it is what the doctor task should notice: a host with a policy_scope that filters frames by owner, but no janela_frame_owner, is misconfigured. Worth adding to ADR 015’s checks.
• Duck typing means a typo in the method name fails silently, which is the cost of not having configuration. The doctor check above is the mitigation.
• The same question will arrive for any other record Janela writes on a host’s behalf. The answer is this pattern rather than a second setting, and this ADR is the precedent to cite.