Handle User Selecting Which Company To Manage

[rancid olive]

Hey there!

I have this situation where the user can manage many companies (many-to-many relationship), and I need to know which company he wants to manage before letting him access the dashboard.

I thought about creating a page with all the companies he has access to and from there he can choose one and then store the company slug in the session, but don't know if its a good approach to this situation or not, and would like to know if there's a better approach .

Any suggestions/approaches are very much appreciated, and thanks in advance!

[maiden palm]

Why don't you just use the company in the routes to handle what dashboard he is accessing?

[rancid olive]

but how to decide if he has 2 companies to manage?

[maiden palm]

Just have them choose a company

You can have a company selection page, or a drop down menu in the navigation, or on login.

[rancid olive]

Exactly! And that should be done through a dedicated page right?

before accessing the dashboard subdomain, so I can always take that company slug/id

[maiden palm]

That is a development choice.

[rancid olive]

right?

[maiden palm]

You could just have a dropdown in the navigation if you wanted like I said above.

[rancid olive]

Yup, a dropdown will be offered in the dashboard nav to switch between companies

@maiden palm What do you think about this approach?

I mean, the company selection page, and then a dropdown in the dash-nav o switch between companies

Is it a good approach?

[maiden palm]

Seems fine to me.

Perfectly normal way to handle it

[rancid olive]

Is it safe to store the current selected company slug in the session?

[maiden palm]

I don't see why it wouldn't be, but why can't you just use url structures?

[rancid olive]

what do you mean by url structures?

sorry, didn't understand

[maiden palm]

Like, /{company}/dashboard

Then whenever you refresh the page, you know where you are going to end up. If you do it in the session, and they move to another company in another browser window, then the original window when refreshed will point to the new session company. Might lead to confusion.

[rancid olive]

Yeah, that's after they select the company they wanna manage, otherwise i wouldn't know which one they're currently managing

[maiden palm]

Your page that has them select a company will just redirect to the appropriate company url, you shouldn't need to store anything in the session.

[rancid olive]

And after they go to another page in the dashboard, how would i know the managed company?

I think I' gonna lose the company slug no?

[maiden palm]

Every page related to the company would be under the company slug.

[rancid olive]

And from where should I get the current company:slug parameter?

[maiden palm]

Its in the url.

So if a company had posts, the routes would be /{company}/posts/{post} - not /posts/{post}.

And your controllers would look like

public function show(Company $company, Post $post) {
   //
}

[rancid olive]

I see!

And I think I should set a CompanyPolicy to check whether or not they own that company

Oh fuck! I forgot to let you know that this feature was told to me after everytinhg is set

[maiden palm]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[rancid olive]

currently, all the dashboard are set like this php Route::post('/company/brands', [CompanyBrandsController::class, 'store'])->name('.company-brands');

hundreds of routes

[maiden palm]

😦

[rancid olive]

because at first, every user could manage only one company

and now they want to let the user manage many companies with roles

[maiden palm]

Well I'd recommend a route refactor, personally - but I guess using session is a fall back.

[rancid olive]

what are the downsides of using sessions?

I'm just asking to know more about the approach

by the way thanks for your time

[maiden palm]

You lose the reliability of a url pointing to exactly what its doing, and you'll need to handle what happens if there is no company in the session.

[rancid olive]

I agree!

the only thing that pushes me to use session is the refactoring (routes/controllers) I need to update

which is insanely annoying

[supple jacinth]

You’re going to need to re-factor any way, to go from $user->company to $request->session('company') or whatever.

Like @maiden palm, I identify the current “company” in both my video on demand platform and multi-tenant CMS by putting the identifier in the URI, i.e.
• /channels/{channel:uuid}/admin/videos/{video}/edit
• /websites/{website:uuid}/admin/articles/{article}/edit

The advantage of this is then you can scope route bindings, so that if video-a belongs to channel-a, then it can only be accessed and edited if the {channel} parameter is channel-a.

/channels/channel-a/admin/videos/video-a/edit -> 200 OK
/channels/channel-b/admin/videos/video-a/edit -> 404 Not Found

[maiden palm]

And call me old fashioned, but if I bookmark a page or come back to it later it should be what I expect it to be.

[rancid olive]

I see! It's a real pain to deal with the all the refactoring i need to do to make this works

[supple jacinth]

Joys of development 🙂

[rancid olive]

@supple jacinth I get you're also against the sessions

[supple jacinth]

Requirements change. Usually the code needs to as well.

[rancid olive]

I totally get why sessions aren't the good approach to go with

[rancid olive]

Yeah, this would break with the session approach I guess

[rancid olive]

and about a company selection page before accessing the dashboard

you're with or against it?

Because I won't know which company slug to structure the url with

[supple jacinth]

Sure. Can just then have hyperlinks to each companies’ dashboard:

<ul>
    @foreach($companies as $company)
        <li>
            <a href="{{ route('companies.dashboard', compact('company')) }}">Go to {{ $company->name }} dashboard</a>
        </li>
    @endforeach
</ul>

[rancid olive]

Great!

And also a dropdown menu in the dash-nav to let theu user switch between the companies

I guess I should check if the user has many companies or just one

to skip the selection page if they have only one, right?

[supple jacinth]

Yeah. I’ve done a redirect to the “first” company is a user only has one in the past.

[rancid olive]

awesome!

[supple jacinth]

I just have a dropdown in the nav menu if a user is associated with more than one website.

[rancid olive]

Thank you so much for your assistance @supple jacinth @maiden palm

Should I delete this thread or keep it for admins?

[supple jacinth]

Add the “solved” tag if you feel your question has been answered.

[rancid olive]

done and if you don't mind, one small question?

[supple jacinth]

So long as it is quick, as I need to head out soon 😅

[rancid olive]

the user can go to the front side of the platform and maybe come back to the dashboard, should I always ask him which company to manage if he has many?

[rancid olive]

If you're in a hurry, nevermind!

[supple jacinth]

It depends how they get to the dashboard. I can’t really say.
In my CMS, if the user puts /admin on the end of their domain, then I just redirect to the admin panel for that particular website, i.e. /websites/{website}/admin

[rancid olive]

Got it, I'll try to figure out a way!