E.J. Zufelt wrote:

Good evening,

Thanks for this.

I took a look at user_access() but wasn't sure that it would do what I needed.  I have to admit to being a newbie as far as Drupal development goes.  I normally work on cor accessibility.

As far as user_access() I see that it can accept a user object, but that it also needs me to pass a permission to check.  What permission would I be checking to see if the current system path can be accessed?  This is why menu_get_item() seemed more appropriate.  It would be nice if there was a function like menu_get_item() that accepted the user object like user_access() does.  Perhaps I'll ad an issue as a feature request for d8 if this doesn't already exist in some hidden corner of d6.

Context is a major weakness in Drupal right now and there is currently a lot of discussion on what to do about that in D8. As for what you can do right now, your global $user hack is probably the only thing you can actually do. it's not elegant at all, but in a contrib module...be very very careful you don't change the $user identity once you're done (so make sure all possible failure scenarios are covered).