CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsactiverecord
Boris SB
Boris SB

Reputation: 43

ActiveRecord Association: one-to-many relationship

CASE

I am working on a model which is composed of the following tables:

The relations I am looking for are:

Meaning basically that users would be able to login, reference their information such as name, last_name, etc... But a user could be a simple visitor or could be a company's employee.

e.g, users will have the choice, but not mandatory, to assign themselves a company they currently belongs_to.

APPROACH

I was thinking in a way to accomplish this:

Creating 2 users tables, one could be employees the other one visitors for instance. But it doesn't seem to cover the case where you change your status, for example, if you don't want to belongs_to a company anymore, this approach seems inefficient.

Or using a boolean column in my users table, "employee?", :boolean, default: false. I am not sure how to handle this tho. How to switch from false to true and assign a user to a company and vise versa?

QUESTION

Is there a way through one single users table to handle both status -visitors and employees- and dynamically switch from a category to another?

Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 1

Views: 121

Answers (1)

Ilya Lavrov
Ilya Lavrov

Reputation: 2860

You may do it with two steps:

1.Make belongs_to relation optional:

# User model
belongs_to :company, optional: true

2.Make scopes and methods to differ visitors and employees:

# User model
scope :visitors, -> { where(company: nil) }
scope :employees, -> { where.not(company: nil) }

def visitor?
  company_id.nil?
end

def employee?
  !visitor?
end

That's it. Now you can do like this:

User.visitors
User.employees

User.find(id).visitor?

Upvotes: 2

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