When you have several entities that are almost the same, but not quite, then using sub- / superclasses might be a good idea.
When a user is either a regular user or an admin, then the boolean flag on the user model is fine, but when you start to get several user types, then I think its better to make subclasses of user for each type. Just add a new field to the user model "type" (string) and then you can create one model for each user type, like class SalesPerson < User end Once that is done you can pretty much treat the models as if they had separate database tables. If you do SalesPerson.new, then rails will automatically set the type field to "SalesPerson". If you do SalesPerson.find, rails will know to look in the users table where type is SalesPerson. The great thing here is that you can have separate models for each user type, without needing a bunch of tables with all the same fields, and you can add logic to the user model that are inherited by all the user types for the logic that the they share. One warning though: Dont try to operate on user.type, this will create weired error messages. If you ever need to access that field directly, use user['type']. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-t...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
