Rails 3 - Removing a User but retaining content?

I've seemed to have gotten myself into a bit of a pickle. I'm trying to write a way to destroy users, but still retain their content.

Currently in my app, a company has many users, and users belongs to one company. A company can make a user inactive if they need to, but I'd also like for the company to be able to remove users from their account in cases of termination, etc.

I was going to simply, on destroy, set the foreign company_id key to nil in the user's table. However, by doing this, the company would lose this old user's work, something that can't hap开发者_如何学JAVApen, as information is populated from doing queries on the company_id.

Has anyone thought of a nice little way of getting around this with a similar DB design? Or will I have to go back to square one to figure out a way to do this more effectively.

Thanks

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This is really more of an interface issue than a data model issue. To be sure, you shouldn't actually delete/destroy the users if you need to retain their information. But if you need a way of removing users apart from just making them inactive, you could add another option for a 'terminated' status. Then it just depends on how and where you display these terminated users in the front end (or maybe you just never display them).

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The "soft delete" pattern is probably the simplest approach. In this scenario, you add a field with boolean semantics that means, essentially "active" or "deleted".

In order to minimize the impact to existing code, you could copy the existing data to a new table with the updated schema, and create a view with the same name as the old table, including only those records not marked as deleted; clients that didn't need to know about the "deleted" users would remain blissfully unaware of those records.

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You might want to checkout acts as paranoid which does a soft delete of users by just setting a deleted flag. This way the row stays in the DB, but does not show up in any generic query results.

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yes can checkout

rails3_acts_as_paranoid - which allows you to hide and restore records without actually deleting them.

This is best technique for your scenario.