[DEPRECATED] Sharing Attributes Across Multiple Profiles

Last edit: Feb 11, 2025

Warning

This article series promotes UserProfiles and Forms, which are deprecated. We decided to reduce the learning curve by promoting explicit implementation via Liquid, Pages and GraphQL, instead of built-in features, which add magic into the mix increasing the learning curve and making debugging harder. Please refer to our Get Started to read up-to date articles, including User Authentication

This guide will help you share attributes across multiple user profiles.
If your profiles happen to have the same Properties, you can extract them to a container profile which will group them and could be used in different profiles.

Requirements

To follow the steps in this tutorial, you should be familiar with users and user profiles. This guide builds on previous tutorials in the Users section.

Users

Steps

Sharing attributes across multiple user profiles is a three-step process:

Step 1: Create profile template

Create a general employee template. You can define other profiles that will have fields from the employee profile and some more.

app/user_profile_types/employee.yml

name: employee properties: - name: name type: string - name: email type: string - name: emergency_contact type: string

Step 2: Create profiles

app/user_profile_types/software_developer.yml

name: software_developer properties: - name: programming_languages type: array

app/user_profile_types/project_manager.yml

name: project_manager properties: - name: projects_managed type: array

Step 3: Use profiles

An example of using the software developer profile on a sign-up form:

app/forms/software_developer_signup.liquid

--- name: software_developer_signup redirect_to: /software-developer/sign-in resource: User fields: profiles: validation: { presence: true } employee: validation: { presence: true } properties: validation: { presence: true } name: { validation: { presence: true } } email: { validation: { presence: true } } emergency_contact: { validation: { presence: true } } software_developer: validation: { presence: true } properties: validation: { presence: true } programming_languages: { validation: { presence: true } } --- [...]

An example of using the project manager profile on a sign-up form:

app/forms/project_manager_signup.liquid

--- name: project_manager_signup redirect_to: /project-manager/sign-in resource: User fields: profiles: validation: { presence: true } employee: validation: { presence: true } properties: validation: { presence: true } name: { validation: { presence: true } } email: { validation: { presence: true } } emergency_contact: { validation: { presence: true } } project_manager: validation: { presence: true } properties: validation: { presence: true } projects: { validation: { presence: true } } --- [...]

Note

If you would like to create a profile on sign up without assigning any property, please make sure that params would include at minimum form[profiles_attributes][_attributes]. You can achieve it with hidden input and form or via default_payload json.