Save Extra Contact Data in Data Store - google-app-engine

Question

we are making a social network using GAE, and when we are going to create user's, we need to save contact's data about facebook, twitter, etc...
This extra contact data must be administrable by an administrator, so if the administrator adds "Whatsapp", to all users must appear a field "Whatsapp" optional, and if the administrator deletes the facebook data, all users' facebook info must be deleted.
What is the best option to save this data, considering the most efficient way, for example, for get the all user's facebook, for delete all user's twitter... by an administrator?
Thanks

Answer 1

There are many ways to solve this problem. One would be to have a config model, such as (assuming python) ...
class Config(db.Model):
""" singleton model """
twitter = db.BooleanProperty(default=False)
facebook = db.BooleanProperty(default=False)
whatsapp = db.BooleanProperty(default=False)
And separate fields on your profile model for each social username ...
class Profile(db.Model):
name = db.StringProperty() # users name
twitter = db.StringProperty() # store twitter username here
facebook = db.StringProperty() # store facebook username here
whatsapp = db.StringProperty() # store whatsapp username here
When you render the profile to the client, check the Config class to see what social fields have been enabled, and only render those fields.
To handle the deletion, you may need to write a cron job to iterate through all profiles and delete whatever data has been disabled on the config model.
Hope this helps

Answer 2

You should certainly store all entities that contain a User's specific data in the User's entity group. That enables you to retrieve and manipulate those entities using ancestor queries, which perform better than non-ancestor queries.
To make the detail entities part of a User's entity group, you simply have to create them with the parent parameter. For instance:
class TwitterData(db.Model):
twitter_name = db.StringProperty
def addTwitterData(user, twitter_name):
# User is an instance of users.User
new_twitter_entity = TwitterData(parent=user)
new_twitter_entity.twitter_name = twitter_name
new_twitter_entity.put()
Now, I can get User's data like this:
twitter_accounts = TwitterData.all().ancestor(user).fetch(1000)
Also, you can use a kindless ancestor query to get all of the entities in user's entity group:
all_networks = db.Query()
all_networks.ancestor(user).fetch(1000)
# Now, ancestor has all of user's Twitter, Facebook, Myspace accounts.
One of the strengths of this approach is that it allows your users to have more than one account on any of the various services.
If the data that you need to store for the different social sites varies too much to be served by a single, simple model, you can use Expando classes to store entities that store different types of data.