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First of all, Merry Christmas all! What I've been trying to do is real simple (in theory). I have a Devise authentication system that runs with Mongoid as it's ODM. What I want to do is associate certain users with another user where one user is the "parent" of the other "children" users. Think parental controls - there is one parent that has an account and then all of their children are associated with the parent account. The parent account then has a special "parent" role which gives them parental control (or administrative rights) over their children. Same concept here only I'm trying to emulate this in Devise with Mongoid as the ODM. Can Can will be used later for authorization.

The first solution I thought of was to embed the children in the parent account. I do not want to solve this with embedding as I don't see the benefit. If someone could enlighten me as to the benefit of solving this question with embedding, please do. I was thinking about having something like has_many :users instead. Where this may become a problem is can a User really have many users in Devise + Mongoid?

The other thing I was thinking about doing was having Parent and Student models inheriting from the User model (the one with Devise in it). I did not know if that would work with Devise 1.x (and 2.x in the future) considering that I'd be inheriting from a Devise model. If you've tried that before, please let me know your experiences.

With that long-winded explanation done, your thoughts?

-Robert

Using Rails 3.1.x, Devise 1.5.x, and Mongoid 2.3.x

Robert Klubenspies
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  • Do you really need to use devise? Authentication is really easy to do yourself with rails 3.1+ and you could build whichever model makes most sense to you if you were to eschew trying to jam it into devise. – Tyler Brock Dec 27 '11 at 17:42
  • Tyler your thought was right in line with mine! After a long day of designing the more intricate parts of my web app (thank god for flowcharts), I've realized that Devise is too constrictive for this application! I'm now on my way to role some authentication from scratch! – Robert Klubenspies Dec 28 '11 at 00:26
  • Ok great! That doesn't mean your question shouldn't be answered and I'm not familiar enough with devise to be able to help out, sorry about that. Good luck though. – Tyler Brock Dec 28 '11 at 20:20
  • Don't feel bad, I'm sure that someone in the community will come along and answer this for posterity. – Robert Klubenspies Dec 28 '11 at 20:27

1 Answers1

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You can use STI(Single Table Inheritance) which can give a separate layer to differentiate between the two catogories of Users.

You can do this as below(explaination on the basis of ActiveRecord.. you can cgange as and when required):

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
end

class ParentUser < User
end

class ChildUser < User
end

For this you will have to add a type column in the User model.

So whenever you want to create a ParentUser you can do parent_user = ParentUser.create()

and for creating child users

child_user = ChildUser.create()

more detailed blog post here http://rohitsharma9889.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/implement-sti-single-table-inheritance-in-your-rails-models/

You can also refer this question here Rails devise registration form when having STI

Community
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Rohit
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  • I eventually stumbled on this type of option but never had time to implement the functionality I discussed in my questions. Thanks for answering the question as it shows me that I'm not crazy and STI was a viable option. Thanks again. – Robert Klubenspies Mar 08 '12 at 22:24