Naming is hard
Two hardest things in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. But joking aside, naming things is really hard. Yet important. So we should give it a five minute, shall we? For the tenant sake.
Multi-tenants have, yes, you guessed it, tenants. And gems like acts_as_tenant do not complicate it. A tenant is called a tenant. Wonderful. But one could argue you can find a better name for your app. Especially if you are in business of rental homes.
Tenant name options
There are other popular tenant names beyond the simple tenant to pick:
- Organizations, although they can feel a bit formal.
- Teams, although you might need to have one billing for multiple teams.
- Accounts, although they usually conflict with something like user accounts.
All good, all with (possibly) slight problems. And depending on your application and your domain model you might feel like you still want something else.
Many people, many choices.
That's why Business Class let you choose your tenant name from the very beginning. Personally, I often go with Spaces as they feel very generic for me without any implications.
Full circle
And that brings me to the question I have to ask myself. Is this really necessary? How about we just call it a Tenant and call it a day? Sometimes choices just pollute our mind.
But hey, what about that real estate app for tenants?
