CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-rails
Metal
Metal

Reputation: 205

Creating a profile for users model in rails

I have a users model in my rails application. It has a name attribute only along with email & password added to it for login via Devise. I want to create a model Profile for users. How shall I create it. Either by adding profile attributes to existing User model or by creating a model Profile and adding a belongs_to association to it.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2278

Answers (2)

rb512
rb512

Reputation: 6948

Adding more attributes to your user model will make your user object a bit heavy and is not the best idea given that you'll be calling that object quite often. For instance, to verify a user, you don't need to load the profile attributes like location or date of birth, which the current_user helper would. So, its better to extract profile attributes in a separate model and adopt either of gabreilhilal's approaches.

Upvotes: 6

gabrielhilal
gabrielhilal

Reputation: 10769

Well, it depends on the requirements you have.

If a user can have only one profile and you are just going to add some attributes related to the user, there is no reason to create a new class to it.

However, even if a user can have only one profile, you might want to do some normalisations. If so, you might remove some attributes from the users table to create a table profiles, and you will have a one-to-one relationship.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :profile
end 

class Profile < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
end

Well... depending on your requirements, you might have a situation where a user might have more than one profile. If so:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :profiles
end 

class Profile < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
end

To summarise, there is no right or wrong... it will depend on the requirements you have, as well as you design decision.

Upvotes: 5

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