Users and CourseUsers

[pstaabp]

By having a global users table in webwork3 and then course users as well, there's a nice separation in the new database schema and definitely, this is the right way to go.

However, handling them on the client side is a bit of a pain. There's a view that the client side data structures should reflect the database side, however for a CourseUser, part of that data is in the users table and part is in the course users table (imho, this is the right separation. There should be user info that doesn't change and there there should be course user info that can).

However, from a practical point of view, it would be nice with a blended data structure on the client side that mixed User data (like name, email) and CourseUser data (like role and user settings).

My current thinking on this is to have a data structure on the client side, say called "DetailedCourseUser" that was this blend. The getting part of the data is simple on the backend in that it is just db joins. The adding/updating requires splitting any information into the correct DB.