New Rails App - Handling Account Settings

Question

Hello all,

I am building a new Rails-based application that will have Basecamp-like accounts for each subdomain. Each account (client/customer) should be allowed to store different settings such as a color scheme, their subdomain, their preferred authentication mechanism and so forth.

So, how should I handle the settings for each account such that I can easily add new settings later that apply to all accounts? Examples or ideas of how to build the objects and relationships (i.e. many-to-many) would be great. Additionally, if you have any good articles, I would greatly appreciate a link to those. This app needs to be highly professional and I want to make sure that I get some of these basic things right before I jump into the remainder of the project.

Thanks very much!

Answer 1

This question addresses a similar situation. It's worded a little differently. But if you map the question's description of a product to one of your subdomain it still feels pretty relevant. You're not explicit but with the comparison to basecamp I'm assuming that each subdomain will have it's own set of users who also have their own settings. Settings that might not be global to your application. The linked question address that too.

I see this working best as a single table for subdomain settings.

With an index on a column linking it to a customer/client/userid, another one linking it to a subdomanin.

Each option that effects subdomain design gets a column in this table. On page load just look up the row for the subdomain in the table in a before filter and things should go relatively smoothly. Adding new global options are simple. Just graft another column onto this table with an appropriate default value.