Question

I am designing a database schema for my project, where I seem to have been stuck by a strange vision-block (in the sense that, I have never had this issue before since its virtually too easy to resolve, except in this particular case – for me)

I have an entity homes, that can have various facilities.
So, I have declared a model: FacilitySet that looks like:

id, home_id, parking, electricity  

As you can see, each row of facility_sets table corresponds to a Home.

But, in my opinion, it would make a whole lot more sense to me, if I could say: a home has_many facilities, rather than a home has_one facility_set. This, also, provides an advantage that I can simply say: @home.facilities, rather than @home.facility_set

The real problem is that I can not understand how to structure the facilities table in the database, so that I can simply declare:

class Home << ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :facilities
  ..
end

and access facilities like: @home.facilities

I am, currently, doing:

class Home << ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one :facility_set
  ..
end

and access facilities like: @home.facility_set, which really makes me feel I am doing something horribly wrong!! :~)

Its early morning here, and I would really really appreciate any ray-of-ho(m)e for me.

Regards

Answer 1

class InitSchema < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :homes do |t|
      t.integer :id, null: false
      # ...
    end

    create_table :facilities do |t|
      t.integer :id, null: false
      t.integer :home_id, null: false
      t.string :name, null: false
      t.string :value, null: false
    end
  end
end

class Home < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :facilities
end

class Facility < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :home
end

Now use the facilities name and values field to store things like parking, electricity, etc. You may want to create a FacilityType class that has_many Facilities, and keep parking, electricity, etc., in there.