Rails - Good way to support creation of drafts for several models

Question

I want to allow users to create drafts of several models (such as article, blog post etc). I am thinking of implementing this by creating a draft model for each of my current models (such as articleDraft, blogpostDraft etc.). Is there a better way to do this? Creating a new model for every existing model that should support drafts seems messy and is a lot of work.

Answer 1

I think the better was is to have a flag in the table (ex: int column called draft), to identify if the record is a draft or not.

Advantages of having such a column with out a separate table, as I can see:

1. It's easy to make your record non-draft (just change the flag)

2. you will not duplicate data (because practically you will have the same in draft and non-draft records)

3. coding will be easy, no complex login

4. all the data will be in one place and hence less room for error

Answer 2

I've been working on Draftsman, a Ruby gem for creating a draft state of your ActiveRecord data.

Draftsman's default approach is to store draft data for all drafted models in a single drafts table via a polymorphic relationship. It stores the object state as JSON in an object column and optionally stores JSON data representing changes in an object_changes column.

Draftsman allows for you to create a separate draft model for each model (e.g., article_drafts, blog_post_drafts) if you want. I agree that this approach is fairly cumbersome and error-prone.

The real advantage to splitting the draft data out into separate models (or to just use a boolean draft flag on the main table, per sameera207's answer) is that you don't end up with a gigantic drafts table with tons of records. I'd offer that that only becomes a real problem when your application has a ton of usage though.

All that to say that my ultimate recommendation is to store all of your draft data in the main model (blog) or a single drafts table, then separate out as needed if your application needs to scale up.