devise and multiple "user" models

Question

I'm using rails 3.2 and devise 2.0 and I'm quite new to Rails.

Requirements

I'd like to achieve the following:

• have 2 or more "user" models, eg. Member, Customer, Admin
• all models share some required fields (eg. email and password)
• each model may have some unique fields (eg. company for Customer only)
• some fields may be shared but not have the same validation (eg. name is required for Customer but optional for Member)
• all fields must be filled during the registration process, so the forms are different
• the login form should be unique

Possible solutions

I googled and searched StackOverflow for quite a long time, but nothing seems right to me (I'm a Java guy, sorry :) and now I'm quite confused. Two solutions came up:

Single devise user

That's the most frequent answer. Just create the default devise User and create relations between Member-->User and Customer-->User. My concern here is how can I achieve a customized registration process for each model? I tried different things but all ended as a mess!

Multiple devise users

This solves the custom registration process, and seems right to me, but the unique login form is a blocker. I found an answer on SO (Devise - login from two model) which suggests to override Devise::Models::Authenticatable.find_for_authentication(conditions). That seems complicated (?) and since I'm new to rails, I'd like to know if that could work?

Thanks for your advice!

Answer 1

Welcome aboard Java guy =), I hope you'll enjoy the Rails world. Simply, to solve your issue you have 2 solutions:

1. For each user create a table in the database and corresponding model.
2. Create a single table in the database and for each user type create a model. This is called single table inheritance (STI).

Which one to choose? It depends on the common attributes of the roles. If they are almost common (for example all have a name, email, mobile, ...) and a few attributes are different, I highly recommend the STI solution.

How to do the STI? 1. Simply create the the devise user model and table using the command rails generate devise User 2. Add a column named type with string datatype to the user table in the database using a migration. 3. For each user type create a model (for example rails g model admin) 4. Make the Admin class inherits from user model

class Admin < User end 

That's it you are done =) ... Yupeee

To create an admin run the command Admin.create(...) where the dots is the admin attributes for example the email, name, ...

I think this question could help you too