I need some suggestions on building a website with Rails as a newbie to programming
I am learning Rails by myself for around 2 months and I now want to build a website to connect individual consultants with individual clients.
My first problem is I am going to create 3 user models by using Devise (one for clients and one for consultants and one for admin) with the following main condition:
Only users can post a question.
Only the posting user and consultants can have comments on the question.
Only user or admin can change the question's status (like
solved or unsolved)
This is because consultant model will require more information to be provided than the client (not only the information but I want the consultants to verify themselves by submitting certificates etc. before becoming a part of professionals on my platform). Any gem to handle this? Or this is better to be achieved by STI using only 1 user model?
Actually, what I actually want to do at the end would be more complicated (and I still have no idea how to create it at this time), what I want to know at this point is that how can I handle 3 different models with the only 1 posting model (especially foreign key) because I am used to creating 1 user model for 1 posting model (and add Boolean for further management).
In addition, if I want to implement the in-app chat function, can I use the action cable for the private chat between the consultant and the client or should I make a new model for the private conversation between them, or do you have any gem to recommend?
Appreciate any comments.
I am going to use STI to avoid any complication as provided in [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9472852/devise-and-multiple-user-models?rq=1][1].
Related
I'm fairly new to rails. I'm having problem on designing the model classes. So this app will be used by 5 different users(Students, Teachers, Head and Coordinator). They each are different users to login into the website and have different functionality (example: Head makes an event. Students register for an event. Coordinator sets who can be head etc). I have created all four models with USERNAME and PASSWORD on each models.I don't have user model right now because the users in this app are these 4 models. Now, while making login page, i'm having hard time on implementing the best way to authenticate the users. For example, If a Head puts its login credentials, the app should identify that user that logged in is Head. What approach will be best to encounter this?
Also, after not figuring out the way to approach this. I was thinking of using devise and CanCanCan gem. But the same promblem comes in even if i use this gems.(i maybe wrong)
Do not create multiple models for different kinds of users. This is almost always not what you want. Instead add a column called role of the type enum which contains all of the kinds of roles you want to add like Sergio pointed out. Your comment about having too many attributes on one model is a non issue compared to the one you are planning to create with 5 user models.
It sounds like you are possible putting too much data on the user model if that is your concern
and have different functionality (example: Head makes an event. Students register for an event.
For this you want a permissions system such as cancancan where you can specify which features of the website each role has access to.
I have seen regular debates about the way to manage the different class of users.
Usually, it seems that developers prefer a role based approach (e.g. user, admin,...) with gems like Cancancan
But I'm wondering if it's applicable for an appointment booking app (appointment for doctors, teachers,... or even bookings). Indeed in this case, the 2 types of users have access to totally different pages. In its documentation about associations, Ruby on Rails guide takes the example of a medical appointment booking app with 1 table for doctors and 1 table for patients.
For this kind of app, I'm a little bit lost regarding the most efficient solution!
Thanks!
You can use a tool like Cancanan to break out the different roles and abilities, then restrict access to certain parts of the system based on those rules.
Additionally you can display only the relevant navigation or pages when the user's accessing the system so they might not even be aware of what they're not seeing.
If I want to build a Rails app that has two different types of users, let's say one type is called players and the other one is owners, what is the best and most efficient approach to modeling the app?
Things to take into account:
There should only be one Login, but different Registration forms that Owners/Players can use.
Owners can have access to a control panel but Players cannot.
Owners cannot share any of Players capabilities, but both need to be able to perform Login/Registration.
I am not using Devise, so please do not suggest it.
Different Approaches I've considered:
Using cancancan gem, but it does not really seem to meet my needs in the sense that I am not looking to create a user/admin hierarchical approach but rather a if you're a Player, then you can see these pages and perform these actions but Owners cannot and vice versa. Almost like splitting the app in two. cancancan seems that it would treat Owners as "Players with extra privileges", not different privileges entirely.
Creating separate models with separate login and registration forms, which seems like a disaster waiting to happen. One small mixup between a Players table and the Owners table, especially with the primary keys, and that will be a world of trouble where people could end up logging in to the wrong accounts.
Creating a polymorphic or has_one relation toward an Account model, which so far, seems like the best way to probably go about it. If I created a polymorphic Account model, I can store different types of Players/Owners, but how could I compare login credentials against all types?
I had been trying to find something on this matter regarding how to map this out and was surprised to not find an information on how to do this without using Devise. If anyone has any good links they can point me to that also address this matter (without Devise), please leave them in your answer! Thanks.
I'd suggest one User class with a type attribute that determines whether the user is a Player or an Owner (single table inheritance). This way you keep the registration logic in one place but can customize the forms depending on the user's class.
There must be alternatives to cancancan that help with what you want to do, or you can implement helpers yourself:
def can_access_control_panel?
current_user.is_a?(Owner)
end
You have to have a way to separate one user from another. One way is to add an attribute to the User table so you can call current_user.role and it will return "owner" or return "player".
I have used Pundit gem in the past. It lets you define which controller actions the current user is allowed to access. So as you create resources for your application, you can add a policy that specifies who is allowed to that given resource. This is the repo to the application.
This answer might help you.
We're building an application for product support. The idea is to have multiple subdomains, each for supporting other organizations products. We call this Account - each account is tied to exactly one subdomain.
Users also have roles - but, user can have one role on account1, and other role on account2.
Basically, there are two problems:
1) many validations are based on the role current user has. Since it depends on current_account (which is session data), I cannot do these kinds of validations in the model. This leads me to some ugly controller code (ugly, in the sense that it really feels out of place). I thought of storing current_account after in the model class variable, but I read that this is not thread safe. Any recommendations?
2) almost every database record is specific to the current account; so, almost every table should have an account_id column and the model should have a belongs_to account association. I want to avoid that. The first (obvious) thing is to have a seperate database for every account, but
a) there are shared tables
b) the boss says this solution is unacceptable (there will be many accounts, with relatively low number of users). Is there a third way?
If anyone runs into similar problem:
The problem described is called multitenancy; understanding default_scope should help. Also, there is the multitenant gem which worked for me nicely.
I am working on an app right now where I have Individuals, Athletes and Coaches. A coach has many athletes and they create athletes as well. Whereas individuals can just come to the site and use a different set of tools. So for functionality and logic reasons I prefer to keep the individual model separate from the athlete model.
When users come to the site I want them to login but it would be confusing to have 3 logins (coach, individual and athlete). Users coming to the site will get confused whether or not they are an individual or an athlete. I was thinking of putting a login link which would have an ajax menu with all three choices, which will look nicer but I still have the multiple login issue.
Does anyone have an idea on how I can make ideally 1 login form for individuals and athletes. I am using authlogic for authentication. I am not looking for code, I can go in and mess around, just wondering if there is a trick to this (making it easier for the user).
Thanks!
You might want to look at the devise gem (http://github.com/plataformatec/devise), this supports using multiple models for authentication.
Why not have the Individual, Athlete and Coach models be subclasses of your User model.
Then you can put all the authentication guff into User and it's available to all three - all through the same login form.
You want to assign Roles to Users. You don't need separate subclasses for each user type, model it so a user has_many :roles.
Have a look at this blog post for a detailed explanation - roles can be very simple if this is all you need.