When calling grant! for records that already have permissions inside of transactions the transaction fails without an exception message

[joshmfrankel]

Sample code to reproduce issue

def grant_feature
  ActiveRecord::Base.transaction do
    some_role = Role.find(role_id)

    AccessControl::SomePolicy.new(some_role).grant!(:some_action)
  end
end

Exception:
Could not grant action 1 on object AccessControl::SomePolicy with id 4 for actor #Role:0x00007fa8f1f5bad0 because PG::InFailedSqlTransaction: ERROR: current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block

This exception is raised here:

accessly/lib/accessly/permission/grant.rb

Line 75 in 1a477f9

raise Accessly::GrantError.new("Could not grant action #{action_id} on object #{object_type} for actor #{@actor} because #{e}")

But is occurring after

rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotUnique
        nil

is encountered which basically hides the actual error.

1. Try to grant! new permission within transaction
2. Permission record already exists which is rescued by rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotUnique and returns nil
3. Transaction then fails and returns the secondary exception message: "Could not grant action 1 on object AccessControl::SomePolicy with id 4"

Underlying issue

The problem is that we're encountering an exception within a transaction which fails the transaction but is being silenced by the return of nil

Potential options

1. I know it is trying to avoid the lookup of db records here but something like an upsert could be a better option instead of rescuing ActiveRecord::RecordNotUnique and silencing the error
2. We could first check to see if the record exists with a find_by and then branch to create! if it doesn't or simply return nil without an rescuing a RecordNotUnique exception
3. We could use find_or_create_by! kinda like upsert