Rails Single table inheritance (STI) with the User model

Question

Building a small reservation site. There are users (who login and work with the site) and there are guests who are being assigned to rooms. users can be (are?) guests but not all guests are also users.

My initial inclination was to set up a belongs_to / has_one relationship between user & guest but maybe STI would work here? Being as users & guests have first_name, last_name, email etc. does it make sense to set up the model such that, say, user and guest both inherit from person?

I will roll my own simplistic authentication so the only additional fields user is likely to have are password_digest, roles_mask and a icon_color.

Any suggestions? I only ask because things can get tricky around authentication, authorization & whatnot.

Appreciate any ideas/tips!

Answer 1

The simplest approach here would be to, as suggested, stick to STI. You can, for example, setup a single devise User model as well as apply ACL with CanCan and define roles for your users.

CanCan's ability spec will determine which resources are accessible and what are not. The advantage here is that users can be guests, and depending on how you setup your ACL, guests can be prevented from having admin like access.

However, Jesse's suggestion of going two separate Devise models is also a good idea as this ensures their sessions are separate. This is more straightforward to implement as you can then setup a User-specific ACL and Guest-specific ACL accordingly.

https://github.com/ryanb/cancan