Help active record modeling

Rails
1

Hi.

I have difficulties to model active record.
So please help my trouble.

Let’s suppose there are nations which have castles at least 1,
and there are 3 types of castles.

So I will make these tables.
NationsTable,
CastlesTable have common attributes of 3 types of castle.
CastlesATable, CastlesBTable, CastlesCTable each have its unique
attributes.

In this case how can I represent this DB to AR?
I think
class Nation < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :castles
end
class Castle < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :Nations
end

but I’m not sure of what will be coded to these models.

class CastleA < ActiveRecord::Base
end
class CastleB < ActiveRecord::Base
end
class CastleB < ActiveRecord::Base
end

please help me.

and second question is
when nation deleted, CastleA, CastleB have to be deleted but not for
the castleC type.
how can I do?

thanks for reading.

2

2009/4/29 serenobs [email protected]

NationsTable,
CastlesTable have common attributes of 3 types of castle.
CastlesATable, CastlesBTable, CastlesCTable each have its unique
attributes.

Easier to call your tables: ‘nations’ for ‘Nation’ model and ‘castles’
for
‘Castle’ model … etc

In this case how can I represent this DB to AR?
I think
class Nation < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :castles
end
class Castle < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :Nations
end

Using the naming convention I suggested above you’d say:
belongs_to :nation

After all, a castle can only belong to one nation at a time right?

You could use single table inheritance (STI).

  1. all castles are stored in one table (‘castles’) which has all the
    required attributes for all types of castles.
  2. in app/models you’ll have your Castle model and then you’ll have a
    CastleA,B and C models like above but you now inherit from Castle:
    class CastleA < Castle
    end
  3. You include a ‘type’ field in ‘castles’ table which is a string and
    is
    the same as the class name of the castle. (ie for an A-type it would be
    ‘CastleA’)

This is a tidy way to handle your castles as everything is in one table.
It
does mean that not all attributes will be used by a given castle
instance if
you have specialised attributes; these will probably be null so I don’t
think the wastage will be much.

and second question is
when nation deleted, CastleA, CastleB have to be deleted but not for
the castleC type.
how can I do?

I’m never good at this stuff. But you could do it with a callback in
your
Nation model:

class Nation < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :castles
before_destroy do |nation|
Castle.destroy_all “nation_id=#{nation.id} and type!=‘#{CastleC}’”
end
end

There’s probably a sexier way to do that.

–
Daniel B.

http://blog.web17.com.au