Ruby on rails with different user types

Question

I\'m trying to build a application that has different kinds of users, I\'m using authlogic for user authentication.

So I have one user model that has the required f

Answer 1

You can create different profile tables and just tie the profile to the user. So for each user type you can create a table and store the specific info there and have a user_id column to point back to users.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :type_1
  has_one :type_2
end

class Type1 < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
end

class Type2 < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
end

Now this isn't very DRY and could lead to problems if you are constantly adding user types. So you could look into polymorphism.

For polymorphism, the users table would define what type the user is (profileable_id and profileable_type). So something like this:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :profileable, :polymorphic => true
end

class Type1 < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :user, :as => :profileable
end

class Type2 < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :user, :as => :profileable
end

Then there is a third option of STI (single table inheritance) for the user types. But that doesn't scale well if the user type fields differ dramatically.

Answer 2

The best approach I saw it here http://astockwell.com/blog/2014/03/polymorphic-associations-in-rails-4-devise/