Record Ownership (with multiple owners types)

Is it necessary to have 2 separate models for your users? It might be easier to have 1 user table with a usertype field which you could set to either student or professor.

Hi @Graham there's only one user model. Imagine that I login as Professor, create a book for the a student with and id of 2.

Then the books table will have a record of: id: 1, professor_id: , student_id: 2, ....

So when later the student logs in can see his books, as well as the professor see his when logged in. (Hope this make sense)

If a professor creates a book, does that book belong to a single student or can that book belong to many students?

@Graham it belongs to a single student :)

@hfalucas and does a student only have 1 book or can a student have multiple books?

@Graham Sorry should also had mentioned that. A student can have multiple books.

@hfalucas have a look at this video https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-5-fundamentals/episodes/21 where Jeffrey goes through many-to-many relationships.

Your schema will probably be a student has many books and a professor has many books (as author) so you'll need to look at pivot tables.

@hfalucas @Graham There is no place for m-m relationship here. It's simple hasMany. There's only one thing that you didn't describe - how do you differentiate Professor from Student if they use the same model?

Anyway, that's not important in this case, because all you need is this (assuming you want to track who created the book author_id and who is the book assigned to owner_id - such names are more readable for the sake of example, you may use student_id and professor_id):

// User model
public function booksCreated()
{
    return $this->hasMany(Book::class, 'author_id');
}

public function booksOwned()
{
    return $this->hasMany(Book::class, 'owner_id');
}

// Book model
public function author()
{
    return $this->belongsTo(User::class, 'author_id');
}

public function owner()
{
    return $this->belongsTo(User::class, 'owner_id');
}

And you use the relationship you need depending on the user type, that's all.

@JarekTkaczyk Exactly.

Btw how would you differentiate the Professor and Student using the same model is that possible? Is there a need for roles?

I was thinking in create a Professor and Student model and make them extend the User model, is there a better way?

@hfalucas It depends on your app. The right way is to use separate models and so on and so forth. It may, but not necessarily will, be better in long run, but will be harder to implement (again, it's the right way, SOLID principles etc).

The easy way is to simply add a flag determining that a user is professor or student - if you don't expect more roles to come and there are not many reasons to separate them. This is the way for little app, when you don't really see the need for good design, but rather to make it work quickly.

I'm using roles already so will keep them. Just need to create the two extra models and make them extend the User model.

Never done that tho. The Login is still made using the User model right?

Once again thanks for the excellent answers @JarekTkaczyk :)

This is pretty much what I was looking for:

https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/general-discussion/advice-how-to-model-different-user-types

@hfalucas Glad you found it then!