Rails - Apr 2006 - Single table inheritance and relations

All,

I''ve a question concerning STI in Rails. Let''s say
I''ve a Person class
and two classes that inherit from Person: User and Customer. In the DB 
I''ve the people table to store both instances of User and Customer.

Now, let''s say I also have Address class, which references a Customer, 
and each customer has many addresses. How should I name the relations? 
Can it be done in the simple way without specifying column names? If it 
can, then what should be the column names?

Ex.

class Customer < Person
  has_many :addresses
end

class Address < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :customer
end

Now, if I call the referencing column in addresses table customer_id, it 
won''t find the people table and if I call it person_id, then 
Customer.find(:first).addresses will generate bad query, because 
addresses table doesn''t have customer_id.

So, should I put all the relations in base class (Person) to make it 
work, and just ignore the fact that User doesn''t have addresses? Or is 
there any other way to solve it?

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

Try using a "person_id" column in the "addresses" table and
specifying the column name in the code. Like this:

class Customer < Person
   has_many :addresses, :foreign_key => ''person_id''
end

class Address < ActiveRecord::Base
   belongs_to :customer
end

Hope that works.

Ryan


On Apr 3, 2006, at 5:09 AM, Maciej wrote:
> All,
>
> I''ve a question concerning STI in Rails. Let''s say
I''ve a Person class
> and two classes that inherit from Person: User and Customer. In the DB
> I''ve the people table to store both instances of User and
Customer.
>
> Now, let''s say I also have Address class, which references a
Customer,
> and each customer has many addresses. How should I name the relations?
> Can it be done in the simple way without specifying column names?  
> If it
> can, then what should be the column names?
>
> Ex.
>
> class Customer < Person
>   has_many :addresses
> end
>
> class Address < ActiveRecord::Base
>   belongs_to :customer
> end
>
> Now, if I call the referencing column in addresses table  
> customer_id, it
> won''t find the people table and if I call it person_id, then
> Customer.find(:first).addresses will generate bad query, because
> addresses table doesn''t have customer_id.
>
> So, should I put all the relations in base class (Person) to make it
> work, and just ignore the fact that User doesn''t have addresses?
Or is
> there any other way to solve it?
>
> -- 
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
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