Question

I have a Business model in my application, which will be storing information about

• Restaurants
• Bars
• Stores
• Hair Salons
• Etc

Some of the businesses share attributes/amenities:

• Wifi
• A/C
• Accesibility
• Etc..

But some are specific for a single type of businesses, for example restaurants:

• Take out
• Delivery
• Dress code
• Outdoor seating

I am wondering what would be the best way of modelling this information in the DB?

My current thinking:

Use a single table for Business that will hold all the information and attributes. Most of the attributes are boolean, therefore whenever an attribute does not apply to a business type, it will simply be false.

I am not sure however, if there is a better way of doing this. Also not sure about how to handle these differences at the view level. For example, when creating a business, I want the option the display/set those attributes that are applicable to the business type.

Answer 1

That is the way I would do it. You should have an attribute called business_type that lets you choose what attributes to display.
For example in the show view:

<% if @business.business_type == "restaurant" %>
  Provides take out: <%= @business.take_out %>
<% end %>

You could use jQuery to change what fields are available on the new form based on what restaurant type it is:

<%= f.select :business_type, [["Restaurant", "restaurant"], ["Store", "store"]] %>
<script>
  $('#business_business_type').change(function(){
    // hide or show fields here based on this.value
  });
</script>

If you want to avoid having a bunch of database columns, you could use the key-value store in rails 3.2 (3/4 of the way down this page):
Make a column called amenities. Then in business.rb:

store :amenities, accessors: [:wifi, :ac, :accessibility, ...]