Question

First here’s my current setup:

models/user.rb

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable,
         :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable, :confirmable
   has_many :events
end

models/event.rb

class Event < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
end

So, this works in the sense that a user have many events that s/he can CRUD. Anyone that is not logged in can only view and list all the events.

From this initial setup, I now have another set of users that are attendees and the current users are now actually event managers instead of just a generic user. Essentially, I now have two models that are both users (since they can both log in/sign up and have the same fields) and I was thinking that event should read something like:

models/event.rb

class Event < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :manager
  has_many :attendees, :through => :attendance # attendance is a join model
end

but I don’t want to create a separate table for managers and attendees and I was thinking of sub classing the user model but I’m not particularly sure about how to go about it. I was looking into the :as and :polymorphic parameters in AR but I’m still not quite sure on how to do it. Help?

Answer 1

What you are looking for is called Single Table Inheritance. Here is one resource on the subject. There are many more. Just google for “Rails Single Table Inheritance”.