anonymous user modeling

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello,

I'm working on my first simple Rails app in which users submit sport "tweets" (e.g. "tennis, squash") and the server matches them up with partners. The server will return you a list of SportMatches based on similar tweets and you have different options (e.g. email, SMS) to reply back to someone's tweet and accept him/her as partner. Initially, the modeling was straight forward since: User has_many SportTweets and SportTweet belongs to User. Notifications were simply part of the User, or they could have been modeled as a 1-to-1 relationship to User.

My business requirements changed a little, as now I have anonymous users who can also post SportTweets. Because they don't have an account/profile, they must also submit notifications (e.g. email, SMS) with the tweet. I don't know how to model this the Rails way. SportTweets are now either anonymous, or authenticated-user-posted (AUP). So, now, my SportTweets table will have the following columns: - type: either "anonymous" or "AUP" - user_id: only for AUP - notifications_id: only for anonymous - sports: for all - post_date: for all - post_location: for all - etc.

There would be a Notifications table. A notification record would belong either to a User, or to a SportsTweet. I guess I would model this with polymorphic associations.

That just doesn't look like the Rails way. Did anyone come across a similar problem? How did you solve it?

Thanks, T

2

Is there a particular reason for storing notifications separately? By that I mean that it seems likely that authenticated users will *also* have SMS / email / etc. I'd typically just borrow the existing User machinery but add in a flag ("anonymous", for instance) that skips the registration parts.

--Matt Jones

3

Hey Matt,

Thanks for the suggestion. I found it in "The Rails 3 Way" - chapter 9: STI tables.

Regards, T