Use the User type for all users?

[matchen]

I think this has been discussed before, but I can’t find it.

I will have various types of people to track. Some of those people are not users of the system. Among users, there aren’t just regular and special, but complete different categories of people who will use the system in very different ways and have completely different sets of fields.

Question: Should I save all people as Users? Should I save all users as users?

The idea of a user type is new to me, relative to my work with other database apps. In my mind, everything is cleaner if each type is unique and has a descriptive name. (E.g. Doctors and Patients. They both are logged-in users, but they do very different things and have very different fields.) I’d prefer not to use the Users type at all, or just to use it for admin. However, I just read some of the documentation, and it seems there are certain behaviours associated with the user type uniquely, having to do with signup/login and tracking.

Can anybody comment on this? Should I just make all users into Users, and use a field to designate their type? If I do that, which is faster/more efficient: putting every User field in the User type, although many will be unused for each user? Or should I have minimal fields there (name, email, etc.) and then have related tables (types) for each of doctors and patients to store their unique fields?

Many thanks

[felipe]

@matchen have you figured that out? I have the same questions and doubts concerning the best way to do that. Its strange to me to use one single type for different kind of users, and I havent found a proper answer so far. Any hints? Cheers.

[andrewgassen]

I create another type of Thing called Teacher. On the Teacher thing, there’s a field of type User, that points to a specific user. The User thing has the basic fields Bubble needs for it’s login system, but all my special sauce lives in the teacher thing. Does that explanation make sense?

I do this in all my apps, I think I got the direction from another thread here a couple years ago. It’s worked so far, but is a tad messy.

[felipe]

gotcha! tkss

[aneejego]

Can I ask please, how do you set up so, for example - teacher to not be able to see some pages that other types of user will see?

[cmarchan]

A condition on the event page load in the workflows tab that allows the page to be loaded only “when teacher’s user is current user”

[cmarchan]

The condition takes place in the workflow tab:

Hope this helps!