Separate Users class [Parse]

Question

I'm building an app that users have to register before they can view the content, I am using Parse for my database needs. What I need is have a class of Users (Parse.User) for regular users and a class of Users (Parse.User) for admins. The regular users would only be able to access the app, the admins would only be able to access an admin website where they will add the content (products) that will show up in the app.

Is it possible to create 2 different classes of Users with Parse? Or should I create the admin user class manually (not using Parse.User)?

Thanks for the help! I'm pretty new at this databases and user thing haha

Answer 1

I'm fairly certain that you can't create 2 different User classes. (Though I may be wrong.)

But regardless, the easiest way to do this would probably be to keep all the users in the same class and just add an admin boolean key to indicate whether or not the user is an administrator; then log the user in (to access the current user's keys) but only proceed with the actions following a successful app login if the admin value is set to false and, likewise, only proceed with the actions following a successful website login if the admin value is set to true. If the admin value indicates that the user shouldn't be logged in on that platform, don't proceed with the login and instead log the user out.

Answer 2

What you really want is to create a Role for Administrators. You can assign ACL permissions to this Role and it will be respected throughout Parse. As you add/remove Users from this Role they automatically have the permissions of their current Role(s).

You can read more about Roles in the documentation, there's a whole chapter about it.

Answer 3

In my App, a user can take on more than one role. My solution to this is to have a User class and then a pointer for each type of user (could be a regular object pointer, but I use something similar). So there would be an "adminLink" pointing to the Admin role-specific object and a userLink pointing to the user role-specific object. The pointer designates the object containing the attributes relevant to that role (user or admin). Attributes common to all roles are stored in the User object.

"Roles" (capital R) are needed to control access to objects. So for each User, you may need to create a user Role and an Admin Role if the person performs both roles (small r). You have to have a reference for each Role. These can be stored either with the User object in separate attributes or in the role-specific user objects.

-Bob