Trying to understand policies

Why do you think it is not called? Can you show policy class?

I have a dd in every policy class function. Will post the class in a second post

dd halts code execution.

Yes, but it should show the message it is set with?

And the code keeps going - it gets a true from somewhere else

I had, but removed that function, and when it was there it would have returned false in this case

(And I put a dd() in there as well)

This is my policy

<?php

namespace App\Policies;

use Illuminate\Auth\Access\Response;
use App\Models\User;
use App\Models\File;
use Illuminate\Auth\Access\HandlesAuthorization;

class FilePolicy
{

    public function create(User $user): bool
    {
        return true;
    }

}

Model

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class File extends Model
{
    /** @use HasFactory<\Database\Factories\FileFactory> */
    use HasFactory;

    protected $table = "file";
    protected $guarded = [];

    public function Application() {
        return $this->belongsTo( \App\Models\Application::class );
    }
}

In my controller

dd(request()->user()->can("create", File::class), request()->user()->can("create"));

The above returns true and then false The first request->user->can now shows what is in FilePolicy, but the second does not.

I assume if I fail to pass a parameter referencing the model to user can, it refers to some default policy. So I should pass a second parameter to make sure it calls the correct policy?

If you don't have specific model you should use can("create", File::class) (with model class name) to check for policy. Specifying model name is the only way to tell Laravel which policy you need (you can have multiple policies with "create" method, can't you?)

You say it returns true (as it should be, you have return true in your policy), so what is your problem?

Will it change to false if you change your policy to return false;?

No problem, I just assumed Can knew which policy I wanted to apply and not that I needed to tell it

how?

and pay attention to standards in php. function names should start with lowercase.

via some sort of stack trace I guess, anyways, problem solved now