Creating a record even if user is not registered - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm implementing a classified website where I want to let user to create classified even if he is not registered. In case he is not registered I take his name, email and phone number. Its like those form on website where one can still create record without registering by only giving his email and name because asking new user to create account would turn away potential customers I am using devise and rails 4 and was wondering how can I implement this ideally.
Class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :classifieds
end
class Classified < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
end
I'm wondering if I should create a guest user as an instance of User or need to create new model to store classified poster that is not registered.

Answer 1

How you do this will depend mainly on how you're going to implement the user authentication
I see you've got devise as a tag - so I'll give you some ideas for it!
--
Devise
Devise has a helper called user_signed_in? - basically tells you if your current_user object is defined (and thus that your user is logged in).
In views, you can use this helper to determine how things work. A good example is in navigation:
#app/views/elements/nav.html.erb
<% if user_signed_in? %>
<%= link_to "Logout", user_session_destroy_path, method: :delete %>
<% else %>
<%= link_to "Login", new_user_session_path %>
<% end %>
In the same way, you can use the conditional nature of user_signed_in? for your form
--
Form
You'll basically need to ensure that you're able to process the form regardless of whether the user is signed in or not (I.E handle the credentials), but you could also use a conditional statement to determine which attributes to use:
<%= form_for #classified do |f| $>
<%= f.text_field :title %>
<%= f.text_field :description %>
<% if user_signed_in? %>
<%= f.fields_for :user do |user| %>
<%= user.text_field :name %>
<%= user.text_field :email %>
<%= user.text_field :phone_number %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
--
Controller
When you get the controller, you'll then need to consider whether the data has been submitted as form data or not. This is where user_signed_in? will again come in handy:
#app/controllers/classifieds_controller.rb
Class ClassifiedsController < ApplicationController
def new
#classified = Classified.new
#classified.build_user unless user_signed_in?
end
def create
#classified = Classified.new(classified_params)
#classified.user = current_user if user_signed_in?
end
private
def classified_params
params.require(:classified).permit(:title, :body, user_attributes(:name, :email, :phone)
end
end

Answer 2

What you can do is inside your create method for classifieds, you can look for a user and if he/she doesn't exist then create a dummy user with some random password and build classifieds for that dummy user. This will also keep your associations intact. Inside your create method you can do something like this:
def create
#user = User.find(params[:user_id])
if !#user
#user = User.create(attributes = {}, ...)
end
#classified = #user.classifieds.build(attributes = {}, ...)
if #classified.save
redirect_to your_path
else
render action: "new"
end
end
You can clean it more by using rails find_or_create_by method