How to handle complex user status?

Question

My application deals with user payments. In the company, this user has the following status:

• compliant (user payed all debts so far)
• overdue/default (user registered for 3 months minimum and has hasn't payed at least 1 debt)
• inactive (user is registered for less than 3 months and hasn't payed any debt)

How is the best way to deal with those rules in multiple places (and rules) inside the application?

Do I need a field like status_id and a cron to update this every hour?

No status_id field and write the SQL rule in every query that needs to show the status?

Load a User model and call a ->status() method that has the rule? In this case, how can I show "totals", like: We have 3000 overdue users, 15000 inactive users etc...

This is giving me headaches for months and I really need help haha. We currently have a solution but it's too complex to deal with it. As it seems to be something common within apps that deal with payment, there's must be a simplier way to do this :P

Thanks!

Notes

• Application has currently 90.000 users
• We need this info in real-time.
• This info is used in reports to generate chars.
• This info is showed inside the user profile.
• This info is showed in listings.
• Users are notified when a user change between those status (like, "you have debts" when user enters in "overdue").
• This info is not managed by application users.
• The status need to be tracked.

Answer 1

Interesting question, but also not one with a single answer.

I think the complexity here might come from the surrounding code, rather than the core business logic and requirements. I say this because three status types, all of which are derived from your internal application, isn't too bad.

One possible solution, and I am assuming some level of MVC or similar.

Given your model, user, and extending an ORM like Eloquent (I will Eloquent from Laravel because I am most familiar with it, but any ORM will work):

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use App\DebtCollector;

public class User extends Model
{
    // Assuming model has the following fields
    // id, status, registration_date, and a one to many
    // relationship with debts 

    protected $fillable = [
        'raw_status',
        'registration_date',
    ];

    public function debts()
    {
        return $this->hasMany(Debt::class);
    }

    public function refreshStatus()
    {
        $dc = new DebtCollector();

        // Business logic inside the "DebtCollector" class
        $this->raw_status = $dc->resolveStatus($this->debts, $this->registration_date);

        // Save value to the underlying datebase
        $this->save();            
    }

    // If you fetch a status directly, it will refresh first, 
    // then return the value
    // 
    public function getStatusAttribute()
    {
        $this->refreshStatus();
        return $this->raw_status;
    }
}


// Schedule task somewhere - ran nightly, or whenever
// 
// This way you can refresh the status only on certain groups
// of data - for example, if the business flow means that once
// they become compliant, they can't go back, there is no need
// to refresh their status anymore 
//
User::where('raw_status', '<>', 'compliant')->refreshStatus();

// Alternatively, the schedule could chunk results and do an update
// only to those not updated in the last 24 hours
//
$date = new DateTime;
$date->modify('-24 hours');
$formatted_date = $date->format('Y-m-d H:i:s');
User::where('last_updated', '>', $formatted_data)->refreshStatus();