Multiple Table Inheritance in Rails 4/Devise setting the current_user

Question

So I have decided to use MTI for different users of my app. The users have different enough info to where I don't think i should use STI and I wanted it more robust down the road. I have an app built in rails 4 using devise that has a polymorphic association for the users, made like this

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  belongs_to :rolable, :polymorphic => true

  # Include default devise modules. Others available are:
  # :confirmable, :lockable, :timeoutable and :omniauthable

  devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable,
     :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable, :confirmable, :timeoutable
end 

with the other classes looking like

class User1 < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :user, :as => :rolable
end

This is all fine and dandy but I am asking how I will set the devise's "current_user" to be an instance of User1? is that possible or recommended? I can make a new User1 and update the :rolable attribute of a user to include a reference to a specific User1 in the console, but I am not sure where to put this in my code.

I want the sign-in information to be the same for all users but I want the user to be able to change user specific info upon login. I was thinking I would modify the user controller to add the User1 model on creation and then in the application controller I would set the current_user to be an instance of User1.

Is this advised or is there a better way to make the current_user?

A second thought i had was setting another variable and getting the type using the columns in the User class. (rolable_id and rolable_type)

Which would be the best way? (I am not the most experienced Rails Developer)

Answer 1

For my project I did not change the current_user from Devise's instance of current_user. instead I created new objects for each user when i needed them and used the current_user's id field as the foreign key for the specific Users. Changing the current_user probably wasn't the best idea because then i lose the reference to the User table and the info in that table. It worked just fine to create an object for each User