I'm making an app with 3 kinds of users: Teachers, Students and Admins.
Teachers can post Classes, with class info and assignments and stuff, and Students can enroll in those classes and do the assignments, get the materials and stuff. The Admins are just the people involved in running the site and will not be taking any of those actions, but just moderating and keeping an eye on things.
My question is, how do I built the separate authentication for those three cases? The users won't have anything in common and I'm gonna need 3 different logins/sign ups from the get-go, so it's not just a matter of assigning different roles.
How should I go about this?
All of those users have one important thing in common - they are all users. I don't see a reason for separating them. If you need users to sign up as a Teacher or Student, you can simply set up different views for those options and the default role that will be assigned to that user.
I don't see a reason why you think that it should be something different than assigning roles. If you really see many differences in data that will be stored for those different types of users, you can for example have have a common Users table and subclass them and store type-specific data in separate tables with reference to the User. However, for now I don't see anything in your description that can force something more than a simple role assigning.
Related
I am trying to implement a feature to my project (kind of like a social media site) that could be either basic or complex and I am not sure if I am going to take forever reinventing the wheel or just go on a crazy tangent that won't work. I just need to "check in" so to say.
I am going to use Facebook terminology as an example to simplify the concept but implement similar features with different names. In Facebook you have Pages and Groups, which are similar yet have slight differences (from now, I will call the collection of these DataSets). Both of these can have multiple admins or followers, which are all User roles, and each User can have roles for multiple Groups and multiple Pages (one role per Group or Page). Then for example, you can click a drop down to change your account to post as a Page you are an admin for.
Essentially, the concept I am describing is where a single User can have a role for multiple different types of DataSets. For example, a single User could follow 30 different Pages and 10 different Groups, and be an admin for one Group and two Pages. Does the concept I am describing belong to a particular concept or software design pattern? I am finding it really hard to describe this feature without using Facebook examples.
I have a strategy to implement this type of functionality in Rails, but I feel like using this strategy would be making the problem harder than it is and there is a fancy rails way of doing it, or a Gem, but I just don't know how to research it due to lack of terminology to describe my problem.
Current strategy is:
I have a Users table from Devise. Pages and Groups are each individual models and have their own tables. I have matching database tables to make the many-to-many relationships between Pages and Users, along with Groups and Users (e.g. 3 column design, column for the user_id, column for the page_id and the type of relationship such as admin or follower). Let's call these Group_User and Page_User. I am being flexible at the moment as I may add more DataSets similar to Page and Group.
Then for the Devise User table, I have an extra two columns to track the DataSet that the User is an admin for and currently posting as. One column is for the DataSet type and the other for the id for this instance (e.g. [Group,1] is stored in these two columns to represent Group with group_id:1 and [Page,3] is used to represent Page with page_id:3). These two columns can be checked when displaying options relevant for admins in that Group/Page and a simple drop down at the top of the site changes the values in these columns to any of the Pages/Groups the logged in User is an admin for. This way, one User login can take on many admin roles and change between these easily as needed.
Is there a better way to do this in Rails, such as a gem or specific design pattern? Or am I on track to implement these features myself? I think I understand the problem but my solution just seems simple/raw and possibly might have unintended consequences later down the track (e.g. it seems database intensive).
One way I was thinking of doing this was making a concern that includes methods to build the relationships and pass in the name of the DataSet as an argument, just so I am not rewriting the same methods for Pages, then Groups, then whatever comes next.
I looked at other solutions such as polymorphic typing (which I think is good for if each user only had one role or only managed relationships for one group or one page) and Single Table Inheritance (but I think my Pages and Groups might be too different for this to work). I thought about using inheritance as well (e.g. a parent for both Group and Page) but I am not sure this helps much.
I am just a guy that studied too much computer science and not enough software engineering. Any tips on how to simplify this problem or just a simple "yeah that will work" would be really helpful!
I think you are going great in the database design. Once participated in a social media application like yours which had similar type of design. Your design seems much better than the one I worked with. In my opinion this type of applications are supposed to be database extensive.
There are several design patterns used in RoR. One I heavily use is Service Object Pattern to maintain thin controller and models. Also it helps me to write reusable class.
Another one I like is the Presenter Pattern to simplify views.
You can have a details look at this blog post for more design pattern ideas.
I have following models (models don't overlap, an accountant can not be a customer):
Company has many accountants
Accountant has many customers
Accountants and customer can sign in / up.
What is the best way to do the auth?
Option A:
Use Devise with two separate models (Accountant & Customer:
https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/wiki/How-to-Setup-Multiple-Devise-User-Models
Option B:
Use Devise with one Model user, then another model Profile, which has some information, for example, column role.
Pros and cons would be very helpful, since I ask my question myself every time I build such a Rails App. I am used to work with Option B
Thanks.
Well, the right solution depends on how you are going to handle these 2 types of users, accountants and customers. Both options are reasonable, however, I would stay with Option B.
Pros are:
You don't have to worry about the same logins of Accountants and Customers models. When using the same Sign In form for logging in customers and accountants (I doubt that there will be 2 different login form for them) the controller will have to find out if it is a customer or accountant. There can be ambiguity if the given login will be in customers and accountants table. When you use only one table, users, there is no such problem.
You don't have to duplicate code related to authorization. Sooner or later, but with 2 different models, it's inevitable. Different views, different mail templates, sometimes different controllers.
I'm not sure about your case, but the same user can be a customer AND accountant at the same time. It's more about usability, and some applications really separate these accounts: that double-role users have separate logins, one for accountant role and other for customer. As for me, it's not user-friendly, and it's better to have a single login with an option to switch between the roles when logged in.
On the other hand, if accountants and customers do not overlap at all, like regular users and admins, then it makes sense to have them in different models. But in this case they would need different interfaces too, the same as admin panel for site administrators and regular UI for regular users.
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.
I'm doing a Rails project with three user types: students, teachers, and administrators. Each user type has a dozen+ columns unique to that role. Initially I thought I'd create separate models for each type, but having a single shared login seems to pose a problem (I've found a workaround on Stack Overflow, but its complex and a few years old).
What is SOP for situations like this? Is it kosher to have a single user model with 24+ columns that will always be empty depending on the role type? Or am I better off sticking with three separate models and trying to hack a workaround to make a shared login?
Thanks!
EDIT: Oops, forgot to add the third workaround which I'm favoring: having a single user model with only columns relevant to login, and then models for each role that hold columns specific to each user type. Is that a good call?
You could make two separate models, Student and Teacher. Then add an admin:boolean field for teacher. I am assuming most admins will probably be teachers? Even if that is not the case you could just default that all admins are teachers. Three separate models is terribly bulky.
Question
I have a User model with authorisation and authentication logic built.
Now I realise I have three different types of users. I want to store different information about each of them.
What is the best way to handle this in Rails?
Thoughts based on current reading
I've looked at STI but from what I've read feel it is inappropriate because I'll end up with a lot of NULL fields in my database.
Ideally I'd like to not duplicate the authentication / authorisation logic for each of the three user types.
Each user will also have different functionality within the application.
You can try using polymorphic associations and creating table users with data that all types of users have and putting other data in seperate tables. Railscast epizode covering this topic.
There are lots of ways to do this. Here's one approach:
Instead of thinking of different types of users, you could think of roles that a user has.
For example, if a user could be a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, you could have four tables: users, butchers, bakers, candlestick_makers. The latter three role tables each have a user_id column; they "belong to" the user.
If you need to enforce that a particular user has only one role, you will have to do that in the application (since this database schema would allow multiple roles for a single user).
This method is good if there is a lot of stuff that would belong in those role tables. If not, leaving some NULL columns on the users table probably won't kill you.