Rails - Jun 2005 - Banging my head against the model - can anyone help?

Granted, this is not a question about bugs or something - I have a  
site I need to finish and I cannot invent a way to organize a model  
properly.

The situation is as follows. I have a number of Templates and a  
number of Works. Every Work is assigned one of these templates.
Every template defines a number of slots for images that should be  
uploaded for the Work to be valid. The trick here is that I would  
love to keep the templates as files (it''s more convenient for the  
designer that works with me) - but if I can define this slot  
information somewhere separately it''s OK.

The problem is also that every slot has 2 images - a special prepared  
thumbnail (no autogen thumbnails here, this is a requirement) and the  
image which will appear in the popup.

Another problem is that I need to accept (or replace) the images in  
one fell swoop from one form (i.e. from a typical edit/id page, where  
a Work is being edited).

What I tried so far:

Work that has_many Images, every Image has a thumbnail and a file -  
was clumsy, worked only somehow. Besides no matter what I did the  
images never got deleted when I deleted a Work, even though I  
specified :dependent=>true in the Work.

Work that has_many Slots, whereas each Slot has an Image as a  
thumbnail and an Image as a popup - complete screwage, especially  
when you start assigning attributes from @params. And of course no  
cascade deletes, now leaving orphans in 2 tables instead of 1.

Another problem here is that in the form the person should be able to  
upload images non-continously (i.e. - upload image in slot 4 leaving  
slots 1 till 3 empty). This _completely_ screws collection management  
in ActiveRecord, because you can (as per Ruby) do a collection  
assignment like Work.images[5643634]  = Image.new. but the rest of  
the array is just filled with nils.

I am in a desperate need of advice on how to deal with it. For now I  
just made 16 fields in my Work model which hold file names, and it  
works - but it''s clumsy and very ass-backwards (and not normalized).

Is this such a convoluted requirement? I understand that this might  
not be typical for a task, but to me it feels that I don''t understand  
some fundamental Rails Way of implementing this stuff. I feel like  
working against the grain (especially evident when I try to destroy  
associated objects manually and start getting errors on frozen  
objects everywhere)

There must be something that I heavily missed.
-- 
Julian "Julik" Tarkhanov