Rails query using HMTH and multiple join models - ruby-on-rails

I am using Rails 3 and wanted to get the classes a student has access to based upon the model below
class Student
has_many :students_levels
has_many :levels, :through => :students_levels
end
class Class
has_many :classes_levels
has_many :levels, :through => :classes_levels
end
class Level
has_many :students_levels
has_many :classes_levels
end
class StudentsLevel
belongs_to :students
belongs_to :levels
end
class ClassesLevel
belongs_to :classes
belongs_to :levels
end
I came up with the query below but didn't think it seemed like the best Rails way to do things and wanted to get additional suggestions. Thx
Class.where(:id => (ClassesLevel.where(:level_id => Student.find(1).levels)))
I want to add this as an instance method to Student and was thinking there would be a better way doing something with has many through.

I quite did not understand the whole logic behind your class structure. Why you are not connecting students directly into a class? And how a class can have many levels. I mean if you have Math1 and Math2, those are different classes, right? Or do you have Math1,2,3?
Well, anyway, here's the solution if you want to use current assosiations, I hope it suites your needs:
Class Student
...
def available_classes
Class.find(:all,
:include => {:levels => {:students_levels => :student}},
:conditions => ["students.id = ?", self.id])
end
And sorry, this is still in Rails 2.x format...

Related

Has_many: through in Rails. Can I have two foreign keys?

I am a rails newbie and I am trying to create a database schema that looks like the following:
There are many matches. Each match has 2 teams.
A team has many matches.
The team model and match model are joined together through a competition table.
I have that competition model with a match_id and a team1_id and a team2_id.
But I don't know how to make this work or if it's even the best way to go about it. I don't know how to make certain teams team1 and others team2.... two foreign keys? Is that possible?
The match table also needs to hold additional data like team1_points and team2_points, winner and loser, etc.
You can have as many foreign keys as you want in a table. I wrote an application that involved scheduling teams playing in games.
The way that I handled this in the Game class with the following:
class Game < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :home_team, :class_name => 'Team', :foreign_key => 'team1_id'
belongs_to :visitor_team, :class_name => 'Team', :foreign_key => 'team2_id'
You can add appropriate fields for team1_points, team2_points, etc. You'll need to set up your Team model with something like:
class Team < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :home_games, :class_name => 'Game', :foreign_key => 'team1_id'
has_many :visitor_games, :class_name => 'Game', :foreign_key => 'team2_id'
def games
home_games + visitor_games
end
#important other logic missing
end
Note that some of my naming conventions were the result of having to work with a legacy database.
I faced a similar problem, and extending the previous answer, what I did was:
class Game < ActiveRecord::Base
def self.played_by(team)
where('team1_id = ? OR team2_id = ?', team.id, team.id)
end
end
class Team < ActiveRecord::Base
def games
#games ||= Game.played_by(self)
end
end
This way, Team#games returns an ActiveRecord::Relation instead of an Array, so you can keep chaining other scopes.

Has many through associations with conditions

I am trying to add a condition to a has many through association without luck. This is the association in my video model:
has_many :voted_users, :through => :video_votes, :source => :user
I want to only get the voted_users whose video_votes have a value equal to 1 for that video. How would I do this?
I would suggest creating a model method within the video model class
Something like:
def users_with_one_vote
self.voted_users, :conditions => ['value = ?', 1]
end
Then in the controller use video.users_with_one_vote
Then testing is easier too.
Any chance you can change that column name from 'value'. Might give some issues (reserved?).
I'd do this in 2 stages:
First, I'd define the has_many :through relationship between the models without any conditions.
Second, I'd add a 'scope' that defines a where condition.
Specifically, I'd do something like:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :video_votes
has_many :votes, :through=>:video_votes
def self.voted_users
self.video_votes.voted
end
end
class VideoVote
def self.voted
where("value = ?", 1)
end
end
class Video
has_many :video_votes
has_many :users, :through=>:video_votes
end
Then you could get the users that have voted using:
VideoVote.voted.collect(&:user).uniq
which I believe would return an array of all users who had voted. This isn't the exact code you'd use -- they're just snippets -- but the idea is the same.
Would
has_many :voted_users, :through => :video_votes, :source => :user, :conditions => ['users.votes = ?', 1]
Do the trick?
I found that defining this method in my model works:
def upvoted_users
self.voted_users.where("value = 1")
end
and then calling #video.upvoted_users does the trick.
The best way to do this without messing with the relations is by crafting a more complex query. Relations is not the best thing to use for this particular problem. Please understand that relations is more a "way of data definition" then a way of "bussiness rules definition".
Bussiness logic or bussiness rules must be defined on a more specifically layer.
My suggestion for your problem is to create a method to search for users who voted on your video only once. something like:
class Video < ActiveRecord::Base
def voted_once()
User.joins(:video_votes).where("video_votes.value == 1 AND video_votes.video_id == ?", this.id)
end
Rails is magical for many things, but complex queries still have to be done in a "SQL" way of thinking. Don't let the illusional object oriented metaphor blind you
As long as we are throwing around ideas, how about using association extensions.
class VideoVote
scope :upvotes, where(:value => 1)
end
class Video
has_many :voted_users, :through => :video_votes, :source => :user do
def upvoted
scoped & VideoVote.upvotes
end
end
end
Then you feel good about making a call with absolutely no arguments AND you technically didn't add another method to your Video model (it's on the association, right?)
#video.voted_users.upvoted

Rails MTI with polymorphism

Imagine the scenario:
I have a class with different types of students. All students have similar attributes, but each type of student has also unique atributes. So I used MTI to keep the common attributes in the table students and the individual ones in their respective table, and polimorphism to abstract the student type when handling them from the class perspective. I followed this tutorial: http://techspry.com/ruby_and_rails/multiple-table-inheritance-in-rails-3/.
From this, I got to these models:
class Clazz < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :students
end
class Student < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :stu, :polymorphic => true
belongs_to :clazz
end
class Student1 < ActiveRecord::Base
has_one :student, :as => :stu
end
class Student2 < ActiveRecord::Base
has_one :student, :as => :stu
end
My problem comes when I want to instantiate a specific student (indirectly associated to the class through student). I can't do it from the class, because it doesn't have a connection to the specific students and when I try to instantiate it directly, it says it doesn't recognize the ':class' field.
Student1.new(:clazz => #clazz, ... [other atributes]...)
unknown attribute: :class
Can anyone give me a hint on how to accomplish this? Tks
Basically what #Aaron is trying to ask is does this work:
class Student < ...
belongs_to :clazz
end
class Student1 < ...
has_one :student, :as => :stu
accepts_nested_attributes_for :stu
end
Student1.new(:stu => {:clazz => #clazz},...[other attributes])
ActiveRecord doesn't do you any favors by default when you need to initialize across trees of objects like this.
Check out the solution here:
http://mediumexposure.com/multiple-table-inheritance-active-record/
which is similar to
http://techspry.com/ruby_and_rails/multiple-table-inheritance-in-rails-3/.
but from my experience, the former is better. for one, it implements method_missing,
which the latter doesn't do.

Rails: Many-to-many Polymorphic Associations: Getting specific Type of Records

I have the following classes:
class Region < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :geographical_relations, :as => :contained
has_many :geographical_units, :as => :container, :class_name => "GeographicalRelation"
end
class GeographicalRelation < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :container, :polymorphic => true
belongs_to :contained, :polymorphic => true
end
class Country < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :geographical_relations, :as => :contained
end
And I want to be able to, from a Country record, get all the Regions in which it is contained:
c = Country.find(1)
c.regions #=> should return all the regions in which c is contained
For now I've created the following method:
def regions
self.geographical_relations.where(:container_type => "Region").map{|relation| relation.container}
end
But I wonder if there's any way to set an "has_many" association to do this for me.
Cheers.
EDIT:
after trying the alternatives suggested in the comments I only got nice ActiveRecord errors.
The has_many_polymorphs gem seems to be a good way to do this, but for Rails 3 it is not 'officially' supported so for my case it is not a good option.
So I will work with methods like the one described above, putting them in modules and including the respective modules inside each "container"/"contained" models. This seems to work ok. =) Only change I made, to avoid N+1 Queries was adding 'includes':
def regions
self.geographical_relations.includes(:container).where(:container_type => "Region").map{|relation| relation.container}
end
Hopefully this works nicely and fast... =P =)
Anyway if anyone has an answer to solve this I'll look forward to see it! =)
Thanks all!

Polymorphic has_many through Controllers: Antipattern?

I'm tempted to say yes.
A contrived example, using has_many :through and polymorphs:
class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :clubs, :through => :memberships
has_many :gyms, :through => :memberships
end
class Membership < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :member, :polymorphic => true
end
class Club < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :people, :through => :memberships
has_many :memberships, :as => :member
end
etc.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether a Gym is a Club, or any other design flaws.
To add a User to a Club, it's tempting to be RESTful and POST a person_id and a club_id to MembersController, like so:
form_for club_members_path(#club, :person_id => person.id) ...
In this scenario, when we decide to do:
form_for gym_members_path(#gym, :person_id => person.id) ...
We would need to make MembersController decide whether the parent resource is a Club or a Gym, and act accordingly. One non-DRY solution:
class MembersController < ApplicationController
before_filter :find_parent
...
private
def find_parent
#parent = Gym.find(params[:gym_id]) if params[:gym_id]
#parent = Club.find(params[:club_id]) if params[:club_id]
end
end
Shockingly awful if you do it more than once.
Also, it's predicated on the concept that joining a Club and joining a Gym are roughly the same. Or at least, Gym#add_member and Club#add_member will behave in a more or less parallel manner. But we have to assume that Gyms and Clubs might have different reasons for rejecting an application for membership. MembersController would need to handle flash messages and redirects for two or more error states.
There are solutions in the wild. James Golick's awesome ResourceController has a way of dealing with parent_type, parent_object, etc. Revolution On Rails has a nice solution for DRYing up multiple polymorphic controllers by adding some methods to ApplicationController. And of course, ActionController has #polymorhpic_url for simpler cases like Blog#posts and Article#posts, etc.
All this leaves me wondering, is it really worth putting all that pressure on MembersController at all? Polymorphism is handled pretty well in Rails, but my feeling is that using conditionals (if/unless/case) is a clear indication that you don't know what type you're dealing with. Metaprogramming helps, but only when the types have similar behavior. Both seem to point to the need for a design review.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Is it better to be DRY in this scenario, or to know exactly what parent type you have? Am I being neurotic here?

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