CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-3authorizationroles
pingu
pingu

Reputation: 8827

How do you model user roles when the roles have different associations with external models

How do you model user roles when the roles have different associations with external models?

I have two roles, teacher and parent. teachers have an associated school, parents don't. It makes it hard to model teachers and parents in a single model.

I would prefer not to model them separately as their state (fields) are the same, and they both have a "has and belongs to many" (HABTM) association with children.

I have tried using single table inheritance (STI) which solved my immediate problem, but ultimately caused a great deal more problems. I was hoping for a "composition over inheritance" solution.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 103

Answers (2)

Nikolay
Nikolay

Reputation: 1392

if you want to keep one class, conditional relations could help you

class User < AR
  has_one :school, conditions: { role: 'teacher' }
end

Still kinda quirky, but better than STI

Upvotes: 2

MrYoshiji
MrYoshiji

Reputation: 54902

A conditional has_one relation could work for you:

class Role < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :school, conditions: { name: 'Teacher' }
  belongs_to :user

And then you should be able to do:

user = User.first
user.role # let's say he is a Teacher
user.role.school # => should return the school

Some documentation about has_one: http://apidock.com/rails/ActiveRecord/Associations/ClassMethods/has_one

Upvotes: 2

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