I have three activerecord classes: Klass, Reservation and Certificate
A Klass can have many reservations, and each reservation may have one Certificate
The definitions are as follows...
class Klass < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :reservations, dependent: :destroy, :autosave => true
has_many :certificates, through: :reservations
attr_accessible :name
def kill_certs
begin
p "In Kill_certs"
self.certificates.destroy_all
p "After Destroy"
rescue Exception => e
p "In RESCUE!"
p e.message
end
end
end
class Reservation < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :klass
has_one :certificate, dependent: :destroy, autosave: true
attr_accessible :klass_id, :name
end
class Certificate < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :reservation
attr_accessible :name
end
I would like to be able to delete/destroy all the certificates for a particular klass within the klass controller with a call to Klass#kill_certs (above)
However, I get an exception with the message:
"In RESCUE!"
"Cannot modify association 'Klass#certificates' because the source
reflection class 'Certificate' is associated to 'Reservation' via :has_one."
I('ve also tried changing the reservation class to "has_many :certificates", and then the error is...
"In RESCUE!"
"Cannot modify association 'Klass#certificates' because the source reflection
class 'Certificate' is associated to 'Reservation' via :has_many."
It's strange that I can do Klass.first.certificates from the console and the certs from the first class are retrieved, but I can't do Klass.first.certificates.delete_all with out creating an error. Am I missing something?
Is the only way to do this..
Klass.first.reservations.each do |res|
res.certificate.destroy
end
Thanks for any help.
RoR docs have clear explanation for this (read bold only for TLDR):
Deleting from associations
What gets deleted?
There is a potential pitfall here: has_and_belongs_to_many and
has_many :through associations have records in join tables, as well as
the associated records. So when we call one of these deletion methods,
what exactly should be deleted?
The answer is that it is assumed that deletion on an association is
about removing the link between the owner and the associated
object(s), rather than necessarily the associated objects themselves.
So with has_and_belongs_to_many and has_many :through, the join
records will be deleted, but the associated records won’t.
This makes sense if you think about it: if you were to call
post.tags.delete(Tag.find_by(name: 'food')) you would want the ‘food’
tag to be unlinked from the post, rather than for the tag itself to be
removed from the database.
However, there are examples where this strategy doesn’t make sense.
For example, suppose a person has many projects, and each project has
many tasks. If we deleted one of a person’s tasks, we would probably
not want the project to be deleted. In this scenario, the delete
method won’t actually work: it can only be used if the association on
the join model is a belongs_to. In other situations you are expected
to perform operations directly on either the associated records or the
:through association.
With a regular has_many there is no distinction between the
“associated records” and the “link”, so there is only one choice for
what gets deleted.
With has_and_belongs_to_many and has_many :through, if you want to
delete the associated records themselves, you can always do something
along the lines of person.tasks.each(&:destroy).
So you can do this:
self.certificates.each(&:destroy)
Related
I'm having trouble deciding between Single Table Inheritance and a simple has_one relationship for my two models.
Background: I'm creating a betting website with a "Wager" model. Users may create a wager, at which point it is displayed to all users who may accept the wager if they choose. The wager model has an enum with three statuses: created, accepted, and finished.
Now, I want to add the feature of a "Favorite Wager". The point of this is to make it more convenient for users to create a wager, if they have ones they commonly create. One click instead of ten.
FavoriteWagers exist only as a saved blueprint. They are simply the details of a wager -- when the User wants to create a Wager, they may view FavoriteWagers and click "create", which will take all the fields of the FavoriteWager and create a Wager with them. So the difference is that FavoriteWagers acts as only as a storage for Wager, and also includes a name specified by the user.
I read up on STI, and it seems that a lot of examples have multiple subclassing - eg. Car, Motorcycle, Boat for a "Vehicle" class. Whereas I won't have multiple subclasses, just one (FavoriteWager < Wager). People have also said to defer STI until I can have more classes. I can't see myself subclassing the Wagers class again anytime soon, so that's why I'm hesitant to do STI.
On the other hand, has_one doesn't seem to capture the relationship correctly. Here is an example:
Class User < ApplicationRecord
has_many :favorite_wagers, dependent: :destroy
has_many :wagers, dependent: destroy
end
Class FavoriteWager < ApplicationRecord
has_one :wager
belongs_to: user, index: true, foreign_key: true
end
Class Wager < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :favorite_wager, optional: true
belongs_to :user
end
I've also thought about just copying the fields directly, but that's not very DRY. Adding an enum with a "draft" option seems too little, because I might need to add more fields in the future (eg. time to auto-create), at which point it starts to evolve into something different. Thoughts on how to approach this?
Why not just do a join table like:
Class User < ApplicationRecord
has_many :favorite_wagers, dependent: :destroy
has_many :wagers, through: :favorite_wagers
end
Class FavoriteWager < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :wager, index: true, foreign_key: true
belongs_to :user, index: true, foreign_key: true
end
Class Wager < ApplicationRecord
has_one :favorite_wager, dependent: destroy
has_one :user, through: :favorite_wager
end
Your FavoriteWager would have the following fields:
|user_id|wager_id|name|
That way you can access it like:
some_user.favorite_wagers
=> [#<FavoriteWager:0x00007f9adb0fa2f8...
some_user.favorite_wagers.first.name
=> 'some name'
some_user.wagers.first.amount
=> '$10'
some_user.wagers.first.favorite_wager.name
=> 'some name'
which returns an array of favorite wagers. If you only want to have ONE favorite wager per user you can tweak it to limit that. But this gives you the ability to have wagers and users tied together as favorites with a name attribute. I don't quite understand your use case of 'a live wager never has a favorite' but that doesn't matter, you can tweak this to suit your needs.
I'm working on a Rails app (Ruby 1.9.2 / Rails 3.0.3) that keeps track of people and their memberships to different teams over time. I'm having trouble coming up with a scalable way to combine duplicate Person objects. By 'combine' I mean to delete all but one of the duplicate Person objects and update all references to point to the remaining copy of that Person. Here's some code:
Models:
Person.rb
class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :rostered_people, :dependent => :destroy
has_many :rosters, :through => :rostered_people
has_many :crews, :through => :rosters
def crew(year = Time.now.year)
all_rosters = RosteredPerson.find_all_by_person_id(id).collect {|t| t.roster_id}
r = Roster.find_by_id_and_year(all_rosters, year)
r and r.crew
end
end
Crew.rb
class Crew < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :rosters
has_many :people, :through => :rosters
end
Roster.rb
class Roster < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :rostered_people, :dependent => :destroy
has_many :people, :through => :rostered_people
belongs_to :crew
end
RosteredPerson.rb
class RosteredPerson < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :roster
belongs_to :person
end
Person objects can be created with just a first and last name, but they have one truly unique field called iqcs_num (think of it like a social security number) which can be optionally stored on either the create or update actions.
So within the create and update actions, I would like to implement a check for duplicate Person objects, delete the duplicates, then update all of the crew and roster references to point to the remaining Person.
Would it be safe to use .update_all on each model? That seems kind of brute force, especially since I will probably add more models in the future that depend on Person and I don't want to have to remember to maintain the find_duplicate function.
Thanks for the help!
The 'scalable' way to deal with this is to make the de-duplication process part of the app's normal function - whenever you save a record, make sure it's not a duplicate. You can do this by adding a callback to the Person model. Perhaps something like this:
before_save :check_for_duplicate
def check_for_duplicate
if iqcs_num
dup = Person.find_by_iqcs_num(self.iqcs_num)
if dup && dup.id != self.id
# move associated objects to existing record
dup.crews = dup.crews + self.crews
# update existing record
dup.update_attributes(:name => self.name, :other_field => self.other_field)
# delete this record
self.destroy
# return false, so that no other callbacks get triggered
return false
end
end
end
You'll want to make sure that you index the table you store Person objects in on the iqcs_num column, so that this lookup stays efficient as the number of records grows - it's going to be performed every time you update a Person record, after all.
I don't know that you can get out of keeping the callback up-to-date - it's entirely likely that different sorts of associated objects will have to be moved differently. On the other hand, it only exists in one place, and it's the same place you'd be adding the associations anyway - in the model.
Finally, to make sure your code is working, you'll probably want to add a validation on the Person model that prevents duplicates from existing. Something like:
validates :iqcs_num, :uniqueness => true, :allow_nil => true
In my project, I have a self-referential association.
I have a User model:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :relationships, :dependent => :destroy
has_many :peers, :through => :relationships
end
And a Relationship model:
class Relationship < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
belongs_to :peer, :class_name => "User"
end
When two users are peers with one another, there are obviously two records in the database.
When one user opts to end a relationship, I'd like this to destroy both records - not just one side of the relationship.
Is there a better way to go about doing this rather than loading the relationship twice in the controller (once for each side of the relationship)?
Couple of ways this can be done
Firstly is an after delete trigger, this is a pretty controversial way of doing things if you believe in the false promise of database agnosticism, however is one that works - in essence, you look at old.peer_id and old.user_id and then do a delete but reversing the roles. If you want to go down this route, you should consult your database manual as how to implement a trigger.
The second way is an after_destroy callback where you do a
after_destroy do |record|
other = Relationship.find_by_user_id_and_peer_id(record.peer_id, record.user_id)
other.destroy if other
end
The other - and probably more drastic measure is to rework the model, so that it has a boolean accepted field wherein both sides of the relationship are modelled by one record in the database, there is a constraint on records where (peer_id, user_id) = (user_id, peer_id). That way you wont have to worry about deleting both sides, nor having duplicate records.
I have the following setup:
class Publication < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :authors, :class_name=>'Person', :join_table => 'authors_publications'
has_and_belongs_to_many :editors, :class_name=>'Person', :join_table => 'editors_publications'
end
class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :publications
end
With this setup I can do stuff like Publication.first.authors. But if I want to list all publications in which a person is involved Person.first.publications, an error about a missing join table people_publications it thrown. How could I fix that?
Should I maybe switch to separate models for authors and editors? It would however introduce some redundancy to the database, since a person can be an author of one publication and an editor of another.
The other end of your associations should probably be called something like authored_publications and edited_publications with an extra read-only publications accessor that returns the union of the two.
Otherwise, you'll run in to sticky situations if you try to do stuff like
person.publications << Publication.new
because you'll never know whether the person was an author or an editor. Not that this couldn't be solved differently by slightly changing your object model.
There's also hacks you can do in ActiveRecord to change the SQL queries or change the behavior of the association, but maybe just keep it simple?
I believe you should have another association on person model
class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
# I'm assuming you're using this names for your foreign keys
has_and_belongs_to_many :author_publications, :foreign_key => :author_id
has_and_belongs_to_many :editor_publications, :foreign_key => :editor_id
end
I can't seem to wrap my head around this, so I thought I'd post and see if anyone could help me out (please pardon the question if it's insultingly simple: it's complicated to me right now!)
I have these models:
order
service
customer
I think they speak for themselves: a service is what the customer buys when they place an order.
Ok.
So, naturally, I setup these relationships:
# a customer can have many orders
class Customer
has_many :orders
end
# an order belongs to a single customer and can have many services
class Order
belongs_to :customer
has_many :services
end
... but here's where I trip up:
# a service can belong to many orders
class Service
# belongs_to :order ???
end
Because my understanding of belongs_to is that--if I put it there--a service could only belong to one order (it would have only one value in the order_id key field--currently not present--tying it to only one order, where it needs to be able to belong to many orders).
What am I missing here?
There are two ways to handle this. The first is a rails-managed many-to-many relationship. In this case, you use a "has_and_belongs_to_many" relationship in both the Order and Service models. Rails will automatically create a join table which manages the relationships. The relationships look like this:
class Order
has_and_belongs_to_many :services
end
class Service
has_and_belongs_to_many :orders
end
The second way is to manage the join table yourself through an intermediate model. In this case, you might have another model called "LineItem" that represents a Service in the context of an Order. The relationships look like this:
class LineItem
belongs_to :order
belongs_to :service
end
class Order
has_many :line_items
end
class Service
has_many :line_items
end
I prefer the second myself. It's probably just me, but I don't get as confused about what's going on when it's explicit. Plus if I ever want to add some attributes to the relationship itself (like perhaps a quantity in your case) I'm already prepared to do that.
class Customer
has_many :orders
end
class Service
has_many :orders
end
class Order
belongs_to :customer
belongs_to :service
end
The Order should have customer_id and service_id, because it is in a many-to-one relationship with both.
I think this Railscast will help you out - basically you have 2 options. You can use has_and_belongs_to_many or has_many :through.
You will also find that has_and_belongs_to_many has been deprecated in favor of has_many :though => model_name which gives the same (and more) functionality.
I think you have realized this but your order is really a composite domain model, sometimes called an aggregate in DDD speak.
Your Service is a really a listing of some product/service that someone can order. Your order aggregate records what someone ordered.
The aggregate as someone else said is made up of a header, the Order, which includes things like who ordered, the date, does it include taxes, shipping charge, etc. And the Order has_many OrderLineItem's. The OrderLineItem belongs_to Service and contains things like the quantity ordered, belongs_to the product/service, etc.
class Customer < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :orders
end
class Order < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :customer
end
class OrderLineItem < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :Order
end
I personally use the OrderLineItem model name in deference to LineItem because in a system that needs to ship real products, as opposed to services, you might have allocations that link orders to inventory which would have line items and shipments that get the allocated product to the client, which also have line items. So the line item term can become very overloaded. This likely is not the case in your model because you're only doing services.