Question

I have a project going on right now that is really big data model wise. I am trying to figure out the best way to handle inter-model relationships.

For the sake of brevity:

Car
  has_many :passengers
  has_many :items

or

Team
  has_one :head_coach
  has_many :coaches
  has_many :players
  belongs_to :owner

So from the show page I would see who is in the car and what items are in the car. I have some co-workers who think we should have a controller action called manage where they would click a link on the show page to manage the relationship between the other models

So the Team controller would have this

class TeamController < ApplicationController
  # ... magic ...
  def manage_players
     @signed_players = Player.signed_players
     @free_agents    = Player.free_agents
  end
end

The manage_players view would just have links to the actual RESTful actions on the appropriate controller to remove relationships etc…

Anyone have thoughts on how this should be accomplished?

Answer 1

That’s an overly complicated approach, and the good news is, it’s way simpler than you think.

Save yourself some trouble. The quick answer to your question is to use nested resources: you can have a single form that handles the Car and all the associated passengers/items, or the Team and its coach, players, etc.

The action/view you’re describing would just be the edit action on the Car/Team. The manage action name is a nice idea and all, but the action you’re really taking is an edit (nothing special, by what you’re describing), so why confuse what’s going on when the default is to call it edit?

If you want a live example of something that takes advantage of nested routes, check out rpglogger.com (it’s my site). When you play around with it, notice the routes/URLs in the address bar.

It’s also open source. Specifically relevant to your question is:

• see the routes.rb file, and note how I define resources on sections twice – this actually gives me two different versions of the routes – one that’s scoped to the LogBook, and one that’s scoped to the objects in a section
• see the world_object_form.haml (haml also rocks, FYI), which is both my new and edit form – yet it’s short, rather uncomplicated, and pretty easy to read/undestand given what it does.