Question

Does anyone know of any method in Rails by which an associated object may be frozen. The problem I am having is that I have an order model with many line items which in turn belong to a product or service. When the order is paid for, I need to freeze the details of the ordered items so that when the price is changed, the order’s totals are preserved.

Answer 1

I worked on an online purchase system before. What you want to do is have an Order class and a LineItem class. LineItems store product details like price, quantity, and maybe some other information you need to keep for records. It’s more complicated but it’s the only way I know to lock in the details.

An Order is simply made up of LineItems and probably contains shipping and billing addresses. The total price of the Order can be calculated by adding up the LineItems.

Basically, you freeze the data before the person makes the purchase. When they are added to an order, the data is frozen because LineItems duplicate nessacary product information. This way when a product is removed from your system, you can still make sense of old orders.

You may want to look at a rails plugin call ‘AASM’ (formerly, acts as state machine) to handle the state of an order.

Edit: AASM can be found here http://github.com/rubyist/aasm/tree/master