Question

I have a question regarding a simple app I am developing in Rails 3.1, but I am not sure of how to define the associations and am looking for advice on the best way to achieve the following.

I have tapes, each tape contains a barcode.

I have boxes, each box has a name

What i need to track is the act of associating the two , each day up to 24 tapes will be placed into a Box, so i need a way of creating a new association for existing boxes and existing tapes on a form, and ideally track some extra information.

The tapes are on a 5 week cycle, so after 5 weeks a tape will ( possibly ) be associated with a new box.

I am not sure how to model the associations, any help or input would be appreciated

Answer 1

Do you need to track which box it used to belong to? If not, this is a simple belongs_to/has_many association.

class Tape
  belongs_to :box
end
class Box
  has_many :tapes
end

If you need to track past boxes, then you’ll need a join-model:

class WhateverYouWant
   belongs_to :box
   belongs_to :tape
end

and change the box/tape associations to use “:through”