Question

I have a rails app that contains workorders. I’m going to be loading workorders from another system. That system uses a single table for parent and child workorders.

I added a field to the workorders table called parent_id

Is this the right coding in the Workorder model?

 class ParentWorkorder
   belongs_to :parent, class_name => "Workorder"
   belongs_to :child, class_name =>  "Workorder", :foreign_key => "parent_id"
 end

Or would you advise against doing this – and instead create a child workorder table? I think that might make it harder to integrate with the other system.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You can do this in a single table with Rails as well, and for that matter with a single model. I don’t see why you’d need to complicate your app with an additional ParentWorkorder model like you have done. I would instead do the following:

class Workorder < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :parent, :class_name => "Workorder", :foreign_key => "parent_id"
  has_many :children, :class_name => "Workorder", :foreign_key => "parent_id"
end

I’m pretty sure this will give you the functionality that you want.