From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2008-11-10T17:45:44+09:00
Subject: Re: design advice for newbie

John Goetz wrote:
> I would like each link to get only the users having the appropriate
> role. I know I can create the link_to with an additional parameter
> (e.g., role => 'teacher') which will change the route to
> '/users?role=teacher', but is this the correct, RESTful, Rails way of
> doing this? If not, can you please point me in the right direction or
> towards some guidelines? Thanks!

This sounds fine to me, but for an alternative approach you could 
consider Single Table Inheritance. That is, you have separate classes 
for Student, Parent, Teacher etc, but they all live in the users table, 
and can all be considered as a User. Teacher.find(...) will 
automatically be restricted to User.find(:conditions => 
"type='Teacher'")

http://ar.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html

Scroll down to "Single table inheritance" Also, the book "Agile Web 
Development with Rails" has a section on this (but don't buy the 2nd 
edition now, wait for the 3rd edition due in December)

However as already mentioned, this may be a Bad Idea. It's quite 
possible for the same person to be both a student and a parent, or a 
teacher and a trustee.

Person.has_and_belongs_to_many :roles may be a better way of modelling 
this. Admittedly the SQL finders get a bit more awkward.
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