type1fool
Hey Elixir community!
I am trying to conceive an application with many users and many organizations. Each user may be a member of multiple orgs, and each org may have multiple users. I’ve been reading up on authorization and relationships in the DB and contexts. @chrismccord’s article was very helpful in illustrating a couple of approaches to authorization.
This might be too simplistic, but I imagined a column (users.roles) with an array of maps similar to this:
[{org_id: 1234, role_title: :owner}, {org_id: 101, role_title: :contributor}]
where org_id would reference an orgs table, and role_title would reference a roles table.
Is it possible to set relations on an {:array, :map} column? I feel like the answer is no, but this is the first solution that comes to mind. I’m having trouble following the official schema documentation, so I really appreciate any guidance.
Thank you.
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l00ker
You might want to start looking at multi-tenancy using Triplex. You could keep the users table in it’s own schema like
public.usersand store the tenants they belong to there etc.Try a search for Triplex and should find a couple of threads here on the forum with more info on the subject.
michalmuskala
I would advise against keeping references in array or json columns - the reason is that it makes it very easy to get stale data and there’s no way of enforcing foreign key constraints on a data in a “compound” column. I’d suggest using a join table and
has_many through.type1fool
@l00ker @michalmuskala Thank you both for the suggestions. I’ll start reading up on
has_many throughfirst, and see if I can keep my dependencies minimal.type1fool
I’ll also add a link to this episode of Full Stack Radio, which helped me understand multi-tenancy and considerations. It focuses mostly on database design instead of language-specific solutions.
tielur
@michalmuskala Is there a reason why you’d suggest
has_many throughvs amany_to_many? I recently went down this route and ended up using amany_to_manyrelationship. I suppose the biggest difference is being able to have metadata on the join?michalmuskala
many_to_manyis all about hiding the join table. In this use case, as far as I understand, a precise management of data in the join table is required and direct access to the other table (roles) is primarily for reading - that’s the use case ofhas_many through:.In general, though, I personally find
many_to_manynot that useful and almost always go forhas_many through. It gives me more control and withEcto.Multiis not that much more code to do inserts and similar manually.OvermindDL1
This right here. It’s surprising what you end up adding to a join table over time.