Question

I am currently building a Rails app where a User can have many Persons which in turn can have many Projects.

This works very well.

Now my problem is that some persons may belong to the same organisation while other persons may not belong to any organisation at all.

From what I’ve learnt so far, it would be good to move all the information pertaining the organisation into a separate table / model. (Please correct me, if I am wrong.) But what will happen then if a person does not belong to any organisation, i.e. is a private person?
How can all this be modelled in Rails?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Is your problem simply like, You have persons that may or may not belongs to an Organization. Now how will you set it up?

Now as you said you will move the organization related data in a separate table say organizations. And your persons(or people?) should contain a organization_id. If the person doesnt belong to any organization, then it wil be simply null. The model relationships will be somewhat like.

class Person < AR::Base
    belongs_to :organization
end

class Organization < AR::Base
    has_many :persons #or people?
end

I skipped the relations with User and Project model here. Please let me know if I missed any part of your question.

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Update: Based on your last comment
Lets list your scenarios:

1. A person and organization both can have address.
2. If a person doesnt belong to organization, then person may have his own address.
3. If he belongs to a Organization, then his address is actually the organization’s address. Or might have own address.

If address is the only thing repeating in person and organization, then better move it in a separate table addresses.

Organization: has_one :address
Person: has_one :address

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Update 2:

Since things are a bit conditional like

• If person belongs to organization then person.address will return the address of organization.
• Otherwise person.address will return its own address.

Then I would prefer the following way to keep it simple. Add a current_address (or any preferred name) method in your Person model.

def current_address
    return organization.address if organization
    return address
end

call person.current_address instead of person.address to go through the decisions.