datamodel connections - ruby-on-rails

I'm struggling with a new application where I have a User model wich has several associations with itself.
For example a user can have students / parents / administrators, but all of those associations are users as well.
My idea was to create a connection model where I specify the associations id's and the association type. Unfortunately I dont know how to implement this.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thank you!

When a model references itself, it is a self-join. See here. and also google for "self join".
Re: "connection model" needed?
Answer: Rather than "connection model," better terms are "many to many table" or "junction table"
A many to many table is only needed if your data has a many to many relationship. Otherwise, you just need a one to one or many to one relationship.
"A user can have students" The key question is, can one student also have many "users"? If so, then you need a many to many table, otherwise not.
For parents, you could say that a user has exactly zero or one father. If so then a many to many table is not needed.
Edited: Oops, I realize that I no longer know this "cold". I'd have to experiment with sample code to get it right. And unfortunately I don't have the time right now. My apologies.
See Self-Joins doc

Related

Rails: storing arrays in DB vs. setting up relationship

Setting: There are two models with the following attributes.
Person: name, age, work_experience, available_dates
WorkExperience: job_title, starting_date, ending_date
Then, I can do the following
Person
has_many work_experiences
WorkExperience
belongs_to Person
Q1: Should available_dates be an attribute (array of dates) or a child (e.g. Person has_many available_dates)?
Q2: Can Person have work_experiences field that's just an array of objects instead of an individual table in DB?
TL;DR: As in all design questions, I think the answer is "it depends."
On Q1:
I've done both ways before. If I were making this decision, I would consider the following:
Do I see myself adding more information to available_dates in a very near future? For example, it could be location, timezone, commute distance, and so on that would make this data into "availability" in general. In that
case, I'd rather create separate objects with association.
Do I see myself reusing these dates in some other place in my code? Then I'd rather make them into separate objects and persist.
On Q2:
I don't think it'd be good for your sanity. DB has simple datatypes and are not designed to retain object models.
On Q1 I would go with an association instead of an array as it provides more flexibility. So a child, as you call it is what I would do.
On Q2 I would also go with a separate WorkExperience Model as it also provides more flexibility and room for growth. Also the array might get a bit messy as a Person starts gathering work experiences and querying for information might get more complicated than it needs to be with an array. With a separate model Active Record will give you a lot of tools you can use to dig into a person's work experiences.
Hope that helps.

Better solution for mongoid many to many relationship

The mongoid documentation told me that n-n relations should be used with caution
I understand his but don't have an idea how to solve my problem a better way using pure mongoid:
A course has many participants and a participant could participate with many courses. So wouldn't it be faster to store the participant on the course model and do a search over all courses when all courses of a participant are needed?
Your model should be reflective of your use cases.
One way to do this would be to have one model for the courses, one for participants and a 3rd that maps students to courses (with a unique index on course & student to prevent duplicates). This way there is a single model referring to the other 2. This may or may not be ideal based on your access patterns.
I think this is probably a good use case for embedding documents. See the sample syntax on the front page for embeds_many and embedded_in: http://mongoid.org/en/mongoid/
The main downside here is that if you have participants in more than one course, you will have duplicate participants in each of those courses.
Make sure you put an index on the fields you plan to do your lookups for participants with.

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.

SQL Relationships

I'm using MS SQL Server 2008R2, but I believe this is database agnostic.
I'm redesigning some of my sql structure, and I'm looking for the best way to set up 1 to many relationships.
I have 3 tables, Companies, Suppliers and Utilities, any of these can have a 1 to many relationship with another table called VanInfo.
A van info record can either belong to a company, supplier or utility.
I originally had a company_id in the VanInfo table that pointed to the company table, but then when I added suppliers, they needed vaninfo records as well, so I added another column in VanInfo for supplier_id, and set a constraint that either supplier_id or company_id was set and the other was null.
Now I've added Utilities, and now they need access to the VanInfo table, and I'm realizing that this is not the optimum structure.
What would be the proper way of setting up these relationships? Or should I just continue adding foreign keys to the VanInfo table? or set up some sort of cross reference table.
The application isn't technically live yet, but I want to make sure that this is set up using the best possible practices.
UPDATE:
Thank you for all the quick responses.
I've read all the suggestions, checked out all the links. My main criteria is something that would be easy to modify and maintain as clients requirements always tend to change without a lot of notice. After studying, research and planning, I'm thinking it is best to go with a cross reference table of sorts named Organizations, and 1 to 1 relationships between Companies/Utilities/Suppliers and the Organizations table, allowing a clean relationship to the Vaninfo table. This is going to be easy to maintain and still properly model my business objects.
With your example I would always go for 'some sort of cross reference table' - adding columns to the VanInfo table smells.
Ultimately you'll have more joins in your SP's but I think the overhead is worth it.
When you design a database you should not think about where the primary/foreign key goes because those are concepts that doesn’t belong to the design stage. I know it sound weird but you should not think about tables as well ! (you could implement your E/R model using XML/Files/Whatever
Sticking to E/R relationship design you should just indentify your entity (in your case Company/supplier/utilities/vanInfo) and then think about what kind of relationship there is between them(if there are any). For example you said the company can have one or more VanInfo but the Van Info can belong only to one Company. We are talking about a one – to- many relationship as you have already guessed. At this point when you “convert” you design model (a one-to many relationship) to a Database table you will know where to put the keys/ foreign keys. In the case of a one-to-Many relationship the foreign key should go to the “Many” side. In this case the van info will have a foreign keys to company (so the vaninfo table will contain the company id) . You have to follow this way for all the others tables
Have a look at the link below:
https://homepages.westminster.org.uk/it_new/BTEC%20Development/Advanced/Advanced%20Data%20Handling/ERdiagrams/build.htm
Consider making Com, Sup and Util PKs a GUID, this should be enough to solve the problem. However this sutiation may be a good indicator of poor database design, but to propose a different solution one should know more broad database context, i.e. that you are trying to achive. To me this seems like a VanInfo should be just a separate entity for each of the tables (yes, exact duplicate like Com_VanInfo, Sup_VanInfo etc), unless VanInfo isn't shared between this entities (then relationships should be inverted, i.e. Com, Sup and Util should contain FK for VanInfo).
Your database basically need normalization and I think you're database should be on its fifth normal form where you have two tables linked by one table. Please see this article, this will help you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_normal_form
You may also want to see this, database normalization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

RoR: belongs_to_many relationship in Rails?

I have a Model of Key Termsthat can belong to many Articles (1 Term can be used in many articles)? so a user can add key terms used and their explanations to articles for which they are used in? what would be the best way to establish this relationship?
Thank You
You'll want to use a many-to-many relationship so you'll need to use has_and_belongs_to_many (see here). And you'll need to create an interim table for key_term_id and article_id columns named key_terms_articles to maintain the connection.
I think what you want is what's referred to as a HABTM (has and belongs to many) relationship. There's a lot of stuff out there on the topic, and it can be a bit confusing at first to grasp. Try searching for "activerecord HABTM" or "Activerecord polymorph" and that should get you started.

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