Question

I’m using rails 3.2 and devise 2.0 and I’m quite new to Rails.

Requirements

I’d like to achieve the following:

• have 2 or more “user” models, eg. Member, Customer, Admin
• all models share some required fields (eg. email and password)
• each model may have some unique fields (eg. company for Customer only)
• some fields may be shared but not have the same validation (eg. name is required for Customer but optional for Member)
• all fields must be filled during the registration process, so the forms are different
• the login form should be unique

Possible solutions

I googled and searched StackOverflow for quite a long time, but nothing seems right to me (I’m a Java guy, sorry 🙂 and now I’m quite confused. Two solutions came up:

Single devise user

That’s the most frequent answer. Just create the default devise User and create relations between Member–>User and Customer–>User.
My concern here is how can I achieve a customized registration process for each model? I tried different things but all ended as a mess!

Multiple devise users

This solves the custom registration process, and seems right to me, but the unique login form is a blocker. I found an answer on SO (Devise – login from two model) which suggests to override Devise::Models::Authenticatable.find_for_authentication(conditions).
That seems complicated (?) and since I’m new to rails, I’d like to know if that could work?

Thanks for your advice!

Answer 1

I found a way to go and I’m quite happy with it so far. I’ll describe it here for others.

I went with the single “user” class. My problem was to achieve a customized registration process for each pseudo model.

model/user.rb:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  devise :confirmable,
       :database_authenticatable,
       :lockable,
       :recoverable,
       :registerable,
       :rememberable,
       :timeoutable,
       :trackable,
       :validatable

  # Setup accessible (or protected) attributes for your model
  attr_accessible :email, :password, :password_confirmation, :remember_me, :role

  as_enum :role, [:administrator, :client, :member]
  validates_as_enum :role
  ## Rails 4+ for the above two lines
  # enum role: [:administrator, :client, :member]

end

Then I adapted http://railscasts.com/episodes/217-multistep-forms and http://pastie.org/1084054 to have two registration paths with an overridden controller:

config/routes.rb:

get  'users/sign_up'   => 'users/registrations#new',        :as => 'new_user_registration'

get  'clients/sign_up' => 'users/registrations#new_client', :as => 'new_client_registration'
post 'clients/sign_up' => 'users/registrations#create',     :as => 'client_registration'

get  'members/sign_up' => 'users/registrations#new_member', :as => 'new_member_registration'
post 'members/sign_up' => 'users/registrations#create',     :as => 'member_registration'

controllers/users/registrations_controller.rb:

I created a wizard class which knows the fields to validate at each step

class Users::RegistrationsController < Devise::RegistrationsController

    # GET /resource/sign_up
    def new
        session[:user] ||= { }
        @user = build_resource(session[:user])
        @wizard = ClientRegistrationWizard.new(current_step)

        respond_with @user
    end

    # GET /clients/sign_up
    def new_client
        session[:user] ||= { }
        session[:user]['role'] = :client
        @user = build_resource(session[:user])
        @wizard = ClientRegistrationWizard.new(current_step)

        render 'new_client'
    end

    # GET /members/sign_up
    def new_member
      # same
    end

    # POST /clients/sign_up
    # POST /members/sign_up
    def create
        session[:user].deep_merge!(params[:user]) if params[:user]
        @user = build_resource(session[:user])
        @wizard = ClientRegistrationWizard.new(current_step)

        if params[:previous_button]
            @wizard.previous
        elsif @user.valid?(@wizard)
            if @wizard.last_step?
                @user.save if @user.valid?
            else
                @wizard.next
            end
        end

        session[:registration_current_step] = @wizard.current_step

        if @user.new_record?
            clean_up_passwords @user
            render 'new_client'
        else
            #session[:registration_current_step] = nil
            session[:user_params] = nil

            if @user.active_for_authentication?
                set_flash_message :notice, :signed_up if is_navigational_format?
                sign_in(:user, @user)
                respond_with @user, :location => after_sign_up_path_for(@user)
            else
                set_flash_message :notice, :"signed_up_but_#{@user.inactive_message}" if is_navigational_format?
                expire_session_data_after_sign_in!
                respond_with @user, :location => after_inactive_sign_up_path_for(@user)
            end
        end

    end

    private

    def current_step
        if params[:wizard] && params[:wizard][:current_step]
            return params[:wizard][:current_step]
        end
        return session[:registration_current_step]
    end

end

and my views are:

• new.rb
• new_client.rb including a partial according to the wizard step:
  • _new_client_1.rb
  • _new_client_2.rb
• new_member.rb including a partial according to the wizard step:
  • _new_member_1.rb
  • _new_member_2.rb