GreenPlastik
2010-Jan-26 06:23 UTC
Help with Associations: Templates, Documents and Options
So I have a rails project that I''m working on and I have it doing what I want, but I''m fairly certain what I''ve done is at best a horrendous hack. I was wondering if anyone could give me a very general suggestion for my associations. Here''s the overview of my project: The site will have document templates (I''ll actually call them patterns in the app because ''template'' apparently is a reserved word in rails), which will have certain options. Other users can create documents based on the template using a form with questions based on the options from the template. The way I''m doing I have implemented it right now is as follows: Each template has many documents. Each template has a field storing the options as a string. Each document belong to a template. Each document has many options. When a document is created, the options string from the template is parsed and the values are used to create new options for the document. Then I have a form that asks questions based on each of the options for the document. Like I said above, I''m certain this is a hilariously awful hack. The more I think about it, the more I feel like that that templates should have many options and have many documents. That way I could set the options up when the template is created. But then I don''t know how to associate those options back to a document so that I can create a form that will fill out the template''s options to be used in the document. I think I may be missing something not so obvious. I''m sure a lot of this is my inexperience with things like polymorphic associations, and/ or self-referential associations and/or single table inheritance. Anyway, I would appreciate some very top-down suggestions. -Alexis M. -- 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-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.