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Answer 1

+1 A:

This sounds to me like you're naturally leaning towards what is called a polymorphic association. It might be useful for you to have a look at this Railscast by Ryan Bates: Polymorphic Associations

Gav 2009-08-05 18:23:21

Answer 2

+1 A:

I agree with Gav Polymorphic just one table people with a column type and tada

class Person < ActiveRecord:Base
   #methods and associations all people have
end
class User < Person
   #methods and associations specific to users
end
class Guest < Person
   #methods and associations specific to guests
end

ErsatzRyan 2009-08-05 20:03:29

if i went with this approach then its looks like there is one physical database table called people that holds both users and guests which a flag to indicate which one. my users are being created via restful_authentication plugin so i dont know how well that will work. do you see any issues with that. if this works then the need for polymorphic association goes away right (since the items that would make the association polymorphic are now contained in the same physical table)?

thomas 2009-08-05 22:04:56

as long as the people table has all of the fields required for users/restful auth it shouldn't be a problem.

ErsatzRyan 2009-08-06 13:35:19

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