I have four different types of users login in to my website like admin, superadmin, company, and employees. Each of them have different set of pages to see but some common pages as well. Now I am having four different tables to manage them with same login screen for admin and superadmin. When either admin or superadmin logs in I will go and check two tables one by one before giving access. I have a separate login screens for company and employees. Is this the accepted way of doing it?
Actually, I want this to be changed to a single table with all users in it and a role table to differentiate the roles. I believe a four-table concept is really bad. I can’t simply make it to one table because the previous developer had a habit of saving user comments and user activities in text files which is used on website.
Am I right in the way I think that a four-table login system is bad? Is storing logs in a text file that are directly used in website a good idea or not?
You have 4 tables? Just use one user table and a field that can either be ‘admin’, ‘superadmin’, ‘company’ or ’employees’. Then you can have unlimited types of accounts. (I would do number codes like 1,2,3 or 4 instead of string codes or ENUM type field).
But yeah, your single table idea is fine. If you want a role table, do a foreign key to your role field and link it to your role table. You can have a single login too instead of different ones for different users and check for privileges based off that foreign key value.