[Rails] Swapping DBs based on subdomains

[Williams, Chris]

Steve,

> > Hi,
> >
> >         I'm in a situation where I'd like to share the exact same DB
> > structure, controllers, helpers, models and views between two
"teams".
> > Each "team" needs a separate DB that has identical structure but
> > different data.
> >
> > So here's the question: How do I go about setting this up? I'd like
to
> > do it by subdomain (but I've never even tried to set one up, so I'm
> > lost), but would settle for a field on a User class that I can check
> > when they login to know what team's DB to use.
> >
> > Basically the idea is I need multiple production DBs, but would like
> > to share common code and structure across them.
> 
> While splitting the teams up by database would probably use the least
> amount of code change, it might throw up future barriers using tools
> like memcached as you will have to know what database the records
where
> pulled from.
> 
> You could alternately go in and add an ID to link specific records to
> the team that is working with it.
> --
> Steven Critchfield critch at basesys.com

This is the approach I originally took, but it led to some ugly code and
DB round-trips I didn't like. For a lot of pages and pull-down menus I
had to get the logged in user, pull down their team, then filter the
rest of the data by the team. It was ugly.

If I can make the user explicitly choose their team by the subdomain
they enter and then use that assumption inside the associations and
pages it makes everything much, much cleaner.

Thanks,
Chris