Rails model structure for users

Question

I\'m new to rails, and I\'m working on my second rails app.

The app will have different roles for users, but some users will have multiple roles.

Every user of t

Answer 1

I think you don't have to create different models because you don't have specific fields for each one. So you just have to set the "role" of each User. Two options : create a role table or add a role field in the table User. Both solutions work, the second is more flexible but less optimized.

But, in your particular case, you don't have a complex role management so you can find a simpler solution. If all of your users are artists you don't have to specify this in your code, it's contained in the implicit description of what a user is. So you just have to save if a user is an admin or not and I think the best solution is to create a boolean field "is_admin".

After that you will have to create some before_filter in your protected controllers, like that :

before_filter => :authorize, :only => :new, :edit, :create, :update, :destroy

def authorize
  redirect_to :root if not current_user.is_admin?
end

And you can have simple requests like that :

@artists = User.all
@moderators = User.where(:is_admin => true)

If you look for a more complete authorization system you can check this small gem : https://github.com/ryanb/cancan

But I think it's not the case for the moment. If you have a simple problem look for a simple solution !