Architecture for various user types and account creation forms

I'm using Rails 3 and Devise.

I can have 2 types of Users I'm calling 'admin' and 'client', both stored in the Users table, differentiated by the value of the boolean 'admin' column.

An 'admin' can be created 2 ways:

1) Upon the creation of a new account - in this case we also create an associated 'business' record

2) From within an existing account (so one 'business' can have multiple 'admins') - in the case we want to associate it with an existing business record

A 'client' can be created 1 way:

1) From a form separate than those used to create an 'admin' above

In all 3 cases a different form will be used. And upon submission they all have different requirements:

• I want to send different emails to each.
• In the first 'admin' case above I need to check if the requested business url is unique, in the second case I don't. And in the client case I don't.
• In the first 'admin' case I want to create some default database entries upon completion of an account, but not in the second case.
• When a 'client' account is created I want to perform some other actions specific to that account type.

Should I use the same controller for the different User types, or separate them? If they should be the same, how does it know what type of User it should create?

What about the models?

Any thoughts on how to architect this?

Thanks so much.

My initial guess would be to create two subclasses from User called Admin and Client. A bit like this:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
end

class Admin < User
  devise :database_authenticatable, :etc

  after_create :create_business
  validates_uniqueness_of :business_url
  # etc
end

class Client < User
  devise :database_authenticatable, :etc
  # etc
end

Next, you can add different forms in config/routes.rb:

YourApp::Application.routes.draw do

  # for the cases that someone can create their own user
  devise_for :clients
  devise_for :admins

  # for creating it when logged in as admin
  namespace :backend do
    resources :admins
  end
end

Be sure to read up on STI in Rails and read the documentation of Devise.

You can use one controller for this with different actions and direct your forms to those actions:

form_tag(:controller => "people", :action => "search", :method => "get")

from rails form helpers.