Rails - Oct 2009 - Handling missing associations

Hello,

I have a message model which belongs to a user. Users can be deleted,
but messages cannot. What can I do to reference a user that created a
message when it no longer exists?:

1) Create a dummy user. When a user is deleted, assign the dummy user
id to all of its messages.
2) Have a condition to check if the user exists, if not, don''t show
the user info.
3) Don''t really delete the user, just flag it or change its state to
inactive.

These 3 occured to me. Any other options I should have in
consideration? Which one should I follow?

Thanks

Hi Elias Orozco

      So do you want all messages be deleted when its user deleted?If so 
in user model you can add like  (Assuming your association is user 
has_many messages)

user.rb

has_many :messages,:dependent => :destroy

     Now when you delete a user all the dependent messages will also get 
deleted



Sijo
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Elias Orozco wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have a message model which belongs to a user. Users can be deleted,
> but messages cannot. What can I do to reference a user that created a
> message when it no longer exists?:
> 
> 1) Create a dummy user. When a user is deleted, assign the dummy user
> id to all of its messages.
> 2) Have a condition to check if the user exists, if not, don''t
show
> the user info.
> 3) Don''t really delete the user, just flag it or change its state
to
> inactive.
> 
> These 3 occured to me. Any other options I should have in
> consideration? Which one should I follow?
> 
I would use 3.  1 is not worth serious consideration (dummy records are 
seldom good things), and while 2 would work, it wouldn''t let you 
differentiate between messages from different inactive users.
> Thanks
Best,
--
Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
marnen-sbuyVjPbboAdnm+yROfE0A@public.gmane.org
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.