MYSQL and RoR

[Rafael Dalma]

I'm trying to create an application using RoR (Ruby on Rails) that shows only some records of my database (MySQL) depending on a user that belongs to a group/department.

For example, I have a school and there are 2 departments: Finance and Administrative Staff. All of them can see the name of the students, their contact details, etc. Administrative Staff are not interested on
Financial issues, therefore I don't want to show if they have or have not paid school fees. Any person on the staff has an account and some privileges and they can check the information in any available
computer on the school.

I would like to know the answer to the post http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?30,46596,46596#msg-46596 and if roles can be assigned to users how can this be done. The RoR part in the question is just to know if someone has done something similar with this language (or a way to go around this problem)

I'll really appreciate any help.

Thanks