Question

I am scraping a website and basically, I have a table called games and a table called publisher. A game has_one :publisher.

When I find a game, say, Starcraft (with publisher Blizzard), I create a game with title Starcraft, and a publisher with name Blizzard. The problem this:

When I find another game by Blizzard, say Diablo, I create a new game with title Diablo and new publisher with name Blizzard. Now I have two publishers with name Blizzard. How can I ensure that both Starcraft and Diablo both point to the one and only Blizzard?

I though of searching through the database before creating a game, finding if a publisher exists and using that, and if it doesn’t exist then create one and then use it. But is this the normal/best way to do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, you find it first and if it does not exist, then create it:

publisher = Publisher.find_or_create_by_name name: "Blizzard"
publisher.games.build name: "Diablo", <more_params_for_game>
publisher.save

or we could also use create instead of build above.