Rails: removing a user without losing associations (or other ways to allow users)

Question

I have a Rails application that allows users to create various “judgments”, everything is a bit interwoven, we have several classes that are associated with the User class.

When I allow users to “destroy” their account, it is obvious that the associations they have will give me an object nil. So, for example, when I look through all the judgments, I can’t get the user who created the solution if this particular user deleted (destroyed) his account.

• What are the best practices in Rails for such cases?
• Is it possible to consider the user inactive, but keep your account?
• Can I delete a user account and replace related information in other classes?

Answer 1

It really is up to you and what works best for your application. It is not a question of what the Rails standard is what the web standard is. What would you expect if you deleted your account and you were a user of your application? Here are a few options:

• Mark the account as inactive, save the username and minimum profile.
• Delete the user account, but associate all related objects with the anonymous or remote user account.
• Delete all related information.

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