I'm using rails 3.2 and devise 2.0 and I'm quite new to Rails.
Requirements
I'd like to achieve the following:
- have 2 or more "user" models, eg. Member, Customer, Admin
- all models share some required fields (eg. email and password)
- each model may have some unique fields (eg. company for Customer only)
- some fields may be shared but not have the same validation (eg. name is required for Customer but optional for Member)
- all fields must be filled during the registration process, so the forms are different
- the login form should be unique
Possible solutions
I googled and searched StackOverflow for quite a long time, but nothing seems right to me (I'm a Java guy, sorry 🙂 and now I'm quite confused. Two solutions came up:
Single devise user
That's the most frequent answer. Just create the default devise User and create relations between Member–>User and Customer–>User.
My concern here is how can I achieve a customized registration process for each model? I tried different things but all ended as a mess!
Multiple devise users
This solves the custom registration process, and seems right to me, but the unique login form is a blocker. I found an answer on SO (Devise – login from two model) which suggests to override Devise::Models::Authenticatable.find_for_authentication(conditions).
That seems complicated (?) and since I'm new to rails, I'd like to know if that could work?
Thanks for your advice!
Best Answer
Welcome aboard Java guy =), I hope you'll enjoy the Rails world. Simply, to solve your issue you have 2 solutions:
Which one to choose? It depends on the common attributes of the roles. If they are almost common (for example all have a name, email, mobile, ...) and a few attributes are different, I highly recommend the STI solution.
How to do the STI? 1. Simply create the the devise user model and table using the command
rails generate devise User
2. Add a column namedtype
with string datatype to the user table in the database using a migration. 3. For each user type create a model (for examplerails g model admin
) 4. Make the Admin class inherits from user modelThat's it you are done =) ... Yupeee
To create an admin run the command
Admin.create(...)
where the dots is the admin attributes for example the email, name, ...I think this question could help you too