CodeIgniter switching between many accounts

Question

I'm developing an application, where in a user can be a doctor or patient. The table structure as follows.

users(id, first, last, email, phone);
doctors(id, name, phone, user_id);
patients(id, name, phone, user_id);
Each user can have many doctors and patients.

Following are the purposes played by a user.

1. User is only for authentication.
2. If user as a patient, he can do appointments.
3. If user as a doctor, he can approve the appointments.

If the user selects doctor accounts, he can literally works as doctor throughout the application and same applies to patient also. This can be implemented by using session. But I don't know how to come up with a solution. Please help me out. The work would be more appreciated.

Answer 1

You can set the user role in session.

$this->session->set_userdata(array("user_role"=>"P/D")); //p = patient , D - doctor. whatever method you used.

Then you can check role before every action to allow user to do.

if($this->session->userdata("user_role") == "P")

{

//return as patient

}