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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T13:59:42+00:00

I’ve implemented facebook and twitter authentication in an app I’m working on by following

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I’ve implemented facebook and twitter authentication in an app I’m working on by following the excellent Railscasts videos on the topic.

Thus far I have my user model hooked up with Devise and I have my Authentications model built and recording authentication providers when users sign up via them. It looks like this:

id | user_id | provider | uid
-----------------------------
1  |    1    | facebook | xyf
2  |    1    | twitter  | pfr
3  |    2    | facebook | sdf

Now, the next thing I need is to store some of the data that these omniauth providers give me. Facebook for example provides the users gender and the url for their facebook profile. A connection to twitter on the other hand will provide different information on a user.

This leads me to believe that I should have two tables, one for twitter data (TwitterProfile) and one for facebook data (FacebookProfile).

So should I extend my authentications model like this?

id | user_id | provider | uid | facebook_profile_id | twitter_profile_id
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1  |    1    | facebook | xyf |        1            |          
2  |    1    | twitter  | pfr |                     |         2
3  |    2    | facebook | sdf |        2            |

and the my models/user.rb would look something like:

has_many :authentications, :dependent => :destroy
has_one :facebook_profile, :through => :authentications, :source => :facebook_profile
has_one :twitter_profile, :through => :authentications, :source => :twitter_profile

But can my authentications model belong to 3 tables?

  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :facebook_profile, :class_name => "FacebookProfile"
  belongs_to :twitter_profile, :class_name => "TwitterProfile"

It just seems like I’m on the wrong track because I have redundant space in my authentications model ant the relationships seem overly complicated.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You might want to consider a polymorphic association. Say the association is called Profile. Basically, the association has a single profile_id, and a string profile_type column, which indicates what type of profile each authentication has.

    There are lots of resources explaining how to set this up including a Railscast video, a section in the Rails Guides and it’s in the Rails API too.

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