It is interesting to think about traditional db "lookup" tables in rails. Consider the notion of a "stage." A stage can be "active", "suspended", "completed", "terminated", etc. In rails thinking I would have some object models which happen to be "stageable" (polymorphic associations). Example: an employee could be stageable (employee could have many stages- each stage has a stage type). Obviously, the "stage_type" model is the traditional lookup table. Maybe I lack proper understanding but I tend to fear the "find(:all...)" method because I am thinking in terms of thousands of rows. I want to return a list of objects which have some "stage" in the lookup table (with some other conditions). But why do I have to load the whole collection? I mean it seams like I am forced to load that whole collection and then do operations on the collection to group them by stage type (the lookup table). Then I would have to extract the grouped subset. Is there not a better way? I am trying to think about it without resorting to a new join model (since I don''t know how I would parameterize the join model for the different values in the lookup table). Can anyone help straighten my wayward thinking? Thanks, -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
If I was doing this I would just have a table stage and a :belongs_to for each object that can have stages. Then you can query any table on its stage or set of stages in a single query. If you are wanting all objects of any type in a stage then things get very messy as you indicated because you are navigating from the stage using a polymorphic association. In general though that seems overkill. Generally I want things grouped or filtered by stage not all objects regardless of type in a stage. Michael On May 28, 1:09 pm, Philip Dutton <rails-mailing-l...-ARtvInVfO7ksV2N9l4h3zg@public.gmane.org> wrote:> It is interesting to think about traditional db "lookup" tables in > rails. Consider the notion of a "stage." A stage can be "active", > "suspended", "completed", "terminated", etc. In rails thinking I would > have some object models which happen to be "stageable" (polymorphic > associations). Example: an employee could be stageable (employee could > have many stages- each stage has a stage type). Obviously, the > "stage_type" model is the traditional lookup table. > > Maybe I lack proper understanding but I tend to fear the "find(:all...)" > method because I am thinking in terms of thousands of rows. I want to > return a list of objects which have some "stage" in the lookup table > (with some other conditions). But why do I have to load the whole > collection? > > I mean it seams like I am forced to load that whole collection and then > do operations on the collection to group them by stage type (the lookup > table). Then I would have to extract the grouped subset. > > Is there not a better way? I am trying to think about it without > resorting to a new join model (since I don''t know how I would > parameterize the join model for the different values in the lookup > table). > > Can anyone help straighten my wayward thinking? > > Thanks, > > -- > Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Thanks, MichaelLatta, for your input. I still think I am not understanding Rails filtering and finders at a very deep level. Yes it is easy to filter simple models using the built in finder methods. When using these methods with simple tables, I feel like I am working in the object oriented methodology. However, when there are more objects (like employees and stages) I feel like the finders and filtering methods do loose their object oriented feeling. Why? They do not provide access to anything but the one model you started with. As soon as I decide to use the find methods for the Employee object then I immediately have no search level access to the "other" objects owned by Employee instances. Thanks for being patient. I simply want to understand how to do filtering and "finding" by using object oriented "style" only (and not using SQL and also without the complete table being loaded into a collection). -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---