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I'm working with Flask-restplus and I am at a point where I would like to associate each User in my user model to a type of profile, where each user can be associated with one or many profile types. I'm wondering how you guys would go about this. So far, here's what I'm thinking/planning to do. NOTE: I'm not very experienced in web development, so there's a chance I don't know the best way to accomplish this.

Step 1: Create a one-to-many (clients need to also be employees, see below) field (profile_types) relating to a static table that just lists all possible profile options. EXAMPLE:

PK        PROFILE TYPE
1         provider
2         employee
3         client
   .....

The idea here is to track different information and allow for different views/endpoints for users who are tied to certain profile types. Example, employees would provide a valid login authentication and be directed to page A while a client would be directed to page B, etc. We're also planning on collecting different data points within each profile model.

So an instance of a user might look like this, user1.profile == [client, employee'].

NOTE: This is more important for data collection (ie age of employee, start date, etc) than it is for creating directives based on permissions.

Step 2: Upon creating the new user, a signal fires off the creation of a profile based on the profile_types supplied to the user instance. I've used signals with django in the past, is there a signal library for Flask?

Step 3: An empty profile instance(s) now exists for that user. It will be up to a superuser to upload data in bulk or manually fill out profile information.

Is this a sensible way to go about this? My other though is to create a bunch of Boolean fields in the User model is_provider, is_employee, is_client, etc. All fields that are True get assigned a profile instance. What's the best way to go about this?

Thanks everyone!

Andy
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1 Answers1

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Seeing that are you try to validate multiple profile types, you may use 

if user.profile_type in ['employee', 'client']

Now, if you want to add an super user I think you can use this

if user.profile_type in ['employee', 'client'] and user.profile_type == 'superuser'

Now, you relationship is more like 'many-to-many', because you are saying that an client also needs to be an employee, if you mean that some endpoints needs to be accessible for employees and clients, then you need to use a 'many-to-one' relationship (an Stackoverflow question which explains what is that)

For your instances, there is Flask Marshmallow, which has an amazing compatibility with Flask SQLAlchemy if you are using an database, but Flask Marshmallow can work alone.

Axel Anaya
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