Question

I’m learning Rails by building a shop application and I’m having a bit of trouble with redirects. I have 3 roles in the application:

• Buyer
• Seller
• Administrator

Depending on which type they are logged in as then I would like to redirect to a different page/action but still show the same URL for each (http://…/my-account).

I don’t like having to render partials in the same view, it just seems messy, is there another way to achieve this?

The only way I can think of is to have multiple actions (e.g. buyer, seller, administrator) in the accounts controller but that means the paths will look like http://…/my-account/buyer or http://…/my-account/seller etc.

Many thanks,
Roger

I’ve put my code below:

models/user.rb

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    def buyer?
        return type == 'buyer'
    end

    def seller?
        return type == 'seller'
    end

    def administrator?
        return type == 'administrator'
    end

    ...

end

controllers/accounts_controller.rb

class AccountsController < ApplicationController  
   def show
   end
end

controllers/user_sessions_controller.rb

class UserSessionsController < ApplicationController
    def new
        @user_session = UserSession.new
    end

    def create
        @user_session = UserSession.new(params[:user_session])

        if @user_session.save
            if session[:return_to].nil?
            # I'm not sure how to handle this part if I want the URL to be the same for each.
                redirect_to(account_path)
            else
                redirect_to(session[:return_to])
            end
        else
            @user_session.errors.clear # Give as little feedback as possible to improve security.
            flash[:notice] = 'We didn\'t recognise the email address or password you entered, please try again.'
            render(:action => :new)
        end
    end

    def destroy
        current_user_session.destroy
        current_basket.destroy
        redirect_to(root_url, :notice => 'Sign out successful!')
    end
end

config/routes.rb

match 'my-account' => 'accounts#show'

Many thanks,
Roger

Answer 1

In UserSessionsController#create (i.e.: the login method) you could continue to redirect to the account path (assuming that goes to AccountsController#show) and then render different views according to the role. I.e.: something like this:

class AccountsController < ApplicationController  
  def show
    if current_user.buyer?
      render 'accounts/buyer'
    elsif current_user.seller?
      render 'accounts/seller'
    elsif current_user.administrator?
      render 'accounts/administrator
    end
  end
end

Better yet, you could do this by convention…

class AccountsController < ApplicationController  
  def show
    render "accounts/#{current_user.type}"
  end
end