Creating a Class from multiple Models - Rails - ruby-on-rails

I have 4 Models, each defined as follows
--Model/Table--
Competition
Matches
Goals
Teams
These 4 models completes a season's worth of soccer league data. The relationship between these tables are already defined. Now, I want to create a class where it picks up data from all 4 models and generate 1, new class. Like so :
class CompetitionSeason < ApplicationRecord
# Use data from all 4 models to construct a soccer season class
end
That is my intention, but I'm not sure if this is the best practice for doing so. It feels... wrong on a Rails framework level. What is the best practice to achieve this?
Thank you.

You should really have another model called Season or some such which owns (has_(one|many)) each of the constituents.
I'm not sure what Competition is.
Match can belong to either a Competition or directly to Season. I don't get what Competition is so I can't make a good recommendation.
Goal should belong to Match or Competition, and not directly to Season. Season can still have many goals through Match or Competition.
Team should have a SeasonTeam junction table.

Related

How to associate 3 different models in to a 2 model relationship

The gist of the matter is I want to know the best way to associate the below setup.
I have 2 customer models. Individual Customer & Corporate Customer.
I have another Vehicle model. Which I would like to maintain separately.
I would like to have a HMT model called VehicleOwner. Which now adds the r/ship of any of the two(2) customers as an owner & the vehicle.
The reason for this approach is an architecture design to allow the same vehicle to be migrated to other customers and not have every time a customer wants to add a vehicle; they keep adding a vehicle even if we have it.
My question is this?
How can I link in the Vehicle Owner. That the owner can either be an individual customer or a corporate customer.
Or is there another better way to map the two(2) customers with a vehicle.
Thanks
Perhaps you are looking for Polymorphic association in Rails, in your case it would be, VehicleOwner model should look like
belongs_to :customer, polymorphic: true
In IndividualCustomer and CorporateCustomer models
has_many :vehicle_owners, as: :customer
This is just an example of how to implement this, you can read more about in official Rails guides
https://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#polymorphic-associations
Hope that helps!

Rails Alternative to use polymorphic associations

I've see that the polymorphic association break the rules of relational db design and in the end cause more harm to the app. so, the left alternative is using STI. someone can please explain how STI works or know if there is another good alternative in using polymorphic association?
thank's
About STI
When you're using STI, you have one parent model which has its own table in DB. And then you have several submodels. But they don't have own tables. Instead their objects are stored in the table of the parent model.
Let's take a look at the example
Generate parent model Vehicle. Add the type column to it. That column will be used for storing the name of the submodel to which belongs corresponding object.
$ rails generate model vehicle type:string color:string price:decimal{10.2}
Then generate submodels telling that Vehicle is their parent model:
$ rails generate model car --parent=Vehicle
$ rails generate model truck --parent=Vehicle
You'll get the following models:
class Car < Vehicle
end
class Truck < Vehicle
end
Now when you create new car it will be stored in the vehicles table and will have 'car' in the type column. Trucks will be stored in the vehicles table too. But they'll have 'truck' in the type column.
About good and bad alternatives.
You know, STI isn't a silver bullet and is considered as pretty bad practice too. For example it can make the table of your parent model the cluttered nightmare. It can prevent you from indexing your data effectively and so on.
Truth is you can use the certain practice when it fits your needs. STI is good when you have mostly the same submodels maybe with slightly different behavior. In that case your table will be neat and your data will be organized naturally and you will not get much harm.

How to design/model a has many relationship that has a meaningful join table?

I wasn't able to put well into words (in Question title) what I'm trying to do, so in honor of the saying that an image is worth a thousand words; In a nutshell what I'm trying to do is..
Basically, what I have is A Teacher has many Appointments and A Student has many Appointments which roughly translates to:
I'm trying to stay away from using the has_and_belongs_to_many macro, because my appointments model has some meaning(operations), for instance it has a Boolean field: confirmed.
So, I was thinking about using the has_many :through macro, and perhaps using an "Appointable" join table model? What do you guys think?
The Scenario I'm trying to code is simple;
A Student requests an Appointment with a Teacher at certain Date/Time
If Teacher is available (and wants to give lesson at that Date/Time), She confirms the Appointment.
I hope you can tell me how would you approach this problem? Is my assumption of using the has_many :through macro correct?
Thank you!
Both teachers and students could inherit from a single class e.g. Person. Then create an association between Person and Appointments. This way you keep the architecture open so that if in the future you want to add 'Parents' then they could easily be integrated and may participate in appointments.
It may not be completely straightforward how you do the joins with the children classes (Students, Parents, Teachers). It may involve polymorphic relationships which I don't particularly like. You should though get away with a single join table.
In any case, you want to design so that your system can be extended. Some extra work early on will save you a lot of work later.

Parent Model that can only have one child in Rails?

Sorry the title is pretty unclear - I'm just not quiet sure how to phrase the question without explaining it.
I would like to record workouts with my app. I would like a Workout Table (what I'm calling the parent) that has basic information like date and sub_workout_type_id
A workout record can have either a Cardiovascular workout (One Model) or a Strength Workout (Another Model).
My thought on have 3 tables instead of just the 2 Cario Workout model and strength workout model is that I would be able to pull a feed of any type of workout, by pulling the Workout Records and then dig deeper as needed.
Perhaps there is a more ruby-ish way to do this? Because right now I don't know of a way to say has_one_model_or_the_other. Thanks!
I see two options, either you use STI (single table inheritance) : in that case you would have a single table that would be able to contain both a cardiovascular model or a strength workout, and a type. This would only work if the two models share some common characteristics.
Another solution is to write something like
has_one :cardiovascular
has_one :strength
and then use validations to enforce that only one of them is set.
Hope this helps.
As mentioned by #nathanvda, STI could be a good choice.
If you're looking to store class specific data with your models, maybe check out Modeling inheritance with Ruby/Rails ORMs to see if that answer gives you any ideas on how to model this relationship.
Note, the example there uses has_many's but a lot of the ideas are similar.

Objects and Relations in Ruby on Rails

I'm attempting to create a simple web application for some personal development, but I've run into an obstacle, which I'm hoping others will find trivial. I have working classes created, but I'm not sure how define their relationships, or whether their models are even appropriate.
For the sake of argument, I have the following classes already in existence: User, Team, and Athlete
The functionality I'm striving for is for a user to create a team by adding one athlete to the team object. Other users can either add players to the team, or they can add alternatives to an existing athlete on the team roster. Essentially, I want to create some sort of class to wrap an array of athlete objects, we'll call it AthleteArray.
If my understanding is correct, these are the relationships that would be appropriate:
So a Team would have-many AthleteArrays
An AthleteArray would have-many Athletes and would belong-to a Team
Athletes would belong-to a User, and would belong-to a AthleteArray.
Users would have-many athletes, but that would be the extent of their involvement.
Since the AthleteArray class wouldn't have any attributes, is it wise to create it as an ActiveRecord object(would it merely have an ID)? Is there another way to implement this idea(can you define the team class, to have an array of arrays of athlete objects)? I have very little knowledge of RoR, but I thought it would be a good place to start with web development. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Edit: The names of Athletes, Teams, and AthleteArrays are unimportant. Assume that an Athlete is basically a comment, validated against a list of athletes. Duplication is acceptable. If I'm understanding the answers posted, I should basically create an intermediate class which takes the IDs of their parents?
Is response to Omar:
Eventually, I'd like to add a voting system. So after basic team is created, users can individual suggest replacements for a given player, and users can vote up the best choices. For instance, If I have a team of chess_players created:
Bobby Fischer
Garry Kasparov
Vladimir Kramnik
someone might click on Kasparov, and decide that a better athlete would be Deep Blue, so this option would appear nested under Kasparov until it received more votes. This same process would occur for every character, but unlike a comment system, you wouldn't be able to respond to "Deep Blue" and substitute another player, you would simply respond to the position number 2, and suggest another player.
Right, so if I understand the question properly, there will be many possible combinations of athletes for a team, which may or may not use the same athletes?
Something sounds off here, possibly in the naming of your models. Don't quite like the smell of AthleteArrays.
has_many_through might be what you need to access the athletes from your team e.g.
has_many :athletes, :through => :team_permuations # your AthleteArray model
Josh Susser has an old roundup of many to many associations which i guess is what you need, since according to your specification, theoretically it can be possible for an athlete to belong to any number of teams. I suppose the best thing is that you can have automagically populated audit columns (created/updated_at/on) on your many to many associations, which is a nice thing to have.
http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2006/4/20/many-to-many-dance-off
Please comment if you think I have understood the question wrong.
If I understand your need, this is something that can be solved through has_many :through.
basically you can represent this in the database like
athletes:
id
other_fields
teams:
id
other_fields
roster_items:
id
team_id
athlete_id
position
is_active #is currently on the team or just a suggestion
adding_user_id #the user who added this roster item
class Athlete < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :roster_items
end
class Team < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :roster_items
has_many :athletes, :through => :roster_items
end
class RosterItem < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :team
belongs_to :athlete
belongs_to :adding_user, :class_name => 'User'
end

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