Rails - Jun 2006 - trouble wtih webstore schema, handling product variations

Hi Railers,

Does anyone have any guidance on setting up a simple way to handle
product variations (e.g garment size/color)? Initially, I had thought
that I would make a variation model which defined the extra bits, but it
seems quite inflexible especially so if a store were to sell
non-clothing items that also had variants of one flavor or another.

product
  has_many variations
  title
  description
  price
  variations

variation
  belongs_to garment
  has_many images
  size
  color
  sku

would it make more sense for the variation model to subclass the product
and add additional table columns?


As an aside, is anyone else having problems with the list and their
GMail account? I have not received a message since 8h PST.

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

I used STI for something slightly similar for something where each item 
was a type of model, but it had additional characteristics depending on 
whether it was a mainmodel or modelvariation (actually had three levels 
-- parentmodel, mainmodel, and modelvariation).

class Modeltype < ActiveRecord::Base
..
end
class Modelvar < Modeltype
..
end

I''ve then got a one-to-many self-referential relationship on the model 
to define the relationship.

However, re-reading your post, wondering if in your case you have a 
many-many relationship between products and possible product variations: 
a product can have many variations, and presumably some of those 
variations -- e.g. extra large -- can be associated with other products.

So what about
variation
    HABTM products
    variation_group (e.g. size, colour)
    variation_specs (e.g. red, small)

I guess you could even make variation an STI if the variations required 
different details.

IF you used has_many through the join table could contain the SKU.

Then again I could be talking rot -- had a fruitless morning trying to 
sort out a mixin prob...

p.s. Yup, I''ve had the same prob with gmail. Seems OK now though.
   
 

Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater wrote:
> Hi Railers,
>
> Does anyone have any guidance on setting up a simple way to handle
> product variations (e.g garment size/color)? Initially, I had thought
> that I would make a variation model which defined the extra bits, but it
> seems quite inflexible especially so if a store were to sell
> non-clothing items that also had variants of one flavor or another.
>
> product
>   has_many variations
>   title
>   description
>   price
>   variations
>
> variation
>   belongs_to garment
>   has_many images
>   size
>   color
>   sku
>
> would it make more sense for the variation model to subclass the product
> and add additional table columns?
>
>
> As an aside, is anyone else having problems with the list and their
> GMail account? I have not received a message since 8h PST.
>
>

Hi Peter,

I am pretty much a newb, but I had basically the same problem. In my  
schema I have Products and 3 sub products that inherit from Products  
using STI. And I have an Options class (similar to your Variations)  
that belongs_to one of the sub product classes (because the other two  
will never need options). What I did is create to different methods  
for adding items to a cart. The first is add_to_cart, the second is  
add_option_to_cart. And an option contains a Product object or  
reference. Basically I did it this way because I just didn''t think  
that Options had enough in common with Products for them to inherit  
from Product.

I would however be interested in knowing if there''s a simpler way of  
doing this that doesn''t require using two different functions to add  
to the cart (and subsequently dealing with the items in the cart when  
it''s time to submit an order).

Here''s my models...

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
   has_many :line_items

     t.column "price_ca", :integer
     t.column "price_us", :integer
     t.column "catalog_number", :string
     t.column "type", :string
     t.column "form", :string
     t.column "order_number", :integer
     t.column "title", :string
     t.column "has_option", :boolean, :default => false, :null
=> false
     t.column "quantity", :integer
     t.column "created_at", :datetime
     t.column "updated_at", :datetime
end

class HardProduct < Product
   has_many :options
end

class Option < ActiveRecord::Base
   belongs_to :hard_product
   has_many :line_items

     t.column "hard_product_id", :integer
     t.column "description", :string
     t.column "quantity", :integer
end

Take care,
Sean



On 7-Jun-06, at 1:50 AM, Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater wrote:
> Hi Railers,
>
> Does anyone have any guidance on setting up a simple way to handle
> product variations (e.g garment size/color)? Initially, I had thought
> that I would make a variation model which defined the extra bits,  
> but it
> seems quite inflexible especially so if a store were to sell
> non-clothing items that also had variants of one flavor or another.
>
> product
>   has_many variations
>   title
>   description
>   price
>   variations
>
> variation
>   belongs_to garment
>   has_many images
>   size
>   color
>   sku
>
> would it make more sense for the variation model to subclass the  
> product
> and add additional table columns?
>
>
> As an aside, is anyone else having problems with the list and their
> GMail account? I have not received a message since 8h PST.
>
> -- 
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails@lists.rubyonrails.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails

Thank you both, you have given me some good ideas on how to tackle this 
=)

Sean O''Hara wrote:
> Hi Peter,
> 
> I am pretty much a newb, but I had basically the same problem. In my
> schema I have Products and 3 sub products that inherit from Products
> using STI. And I have an Options class (similar to your Variations)
> that belongs_to one of the sub product classes (because the other two
> will never need options). What I did is create to different methods
> for adding items to a cart. The first is add_to_cart, the second is
> add_option_to_cart. And an option contains a Product object or
> reference. Basically I did it this way because I just didn''t think
> that Options had enough in common with Products for them to inherit
> from Product.
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.