"partitioning" table access

Rails
1

Hopefully someone can give me some advice on how to approach this
problem… I’m getting ready to start a large new project where
several different organizations would be working with a lot of tables.
Each table would have an organization_id field to signify which
organization owns that record. Organizations would only be able to
view/edit records they own. Potentially thousands of organizations
and dozens of tables.

I’m hoping rails has some magic way to handle this in the model
somehow. The alternative is I’d have to include a where
organization_id = to virtually every single query…

btw, I’m using mysql, in case there might be some way to accomplish
this on the database level.

2

Hi !

2006/4/5, Tony B. [email protected]:

I’m hoping rails has some magic way to handle this in the model
somehow. The alternative is I’d have to include a where
organization_id = to virtually every single query…

You’ll need the org_id column on your child tables anyway, but Rails
allows you to do it this way:

class Organization < AR::Base
has_many :postings
has_many :employees
has_many :drafts
end

class Posting < AR::Base
belongs_to :organization
end

organization.postings.find(:all, …)

You can use a before_filter in ApplicationController to get the org
into a known variable. This is not unlike regular authentication.

Hope that helps !

3

Well that makes total sense and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it
before. :slight_smile:

Thanks!

4

Also look at with_scope and at the ScopedAccess plugin. Google it.

Tony B. wrote:

Hopefully someone can give me some advice on how to approach this
problem… I’m getting ready to start a large new project where
several different organizations would be working with a lot of tables.
Each table would have an organization_id field to signify which
organization owns that record. Organizations would only be able to
view/edit records they own. Potentially thousands of organizations
and dozens of tables.

I’m hoping rails has some magic way to handle this in the model
somehow. The alternative is I’d have to include a where
organization_id = to virtually every single query…

btw, I’m using mysql, in case there might be some way to accomplish
this on the database level.