Question

I have two tabels user and friends,

The user tabel looks like this:

[id, name, image, location, highschool_name, highschool_year, college_name, college_year, graduteschool_name, graduate_year ]

And the friend tabel looks like this:

[id, uid, name, image, higschool_name, college_name, graduateschool_name, user_id]

I would like to group Users friends by eduaction:

• Group users friends by highschool_name
• Group users friends by college_name
• Group users friends by graduateschool_name

Like this photoshop mockup I made:

I am dev in Rails 3 and would like to use active record to do this, any tip or ideas are welcome.

Answer 1

You should create higschool, college and graduateschool models and use relations to users.
And friends data should be on user model.

So you should have

User
  has_many :friendships
  has_many :friends, :through => :friendships
  has_many :inverse_friendships, :class_name => "Friendship", :foreign_key => "friend_id"
  has_many :inverse_friends, :through => :inverse_friendships, :source => :user
  belongs_to :higschool
  belongs_to :college
  belongs_to :graduateschool

Friendship
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :friend, :class_name => "User"

Higschool
  has_many :users

College
  has_many :users

Graduateschool
  has_many :users

So, now I think you can do something like.

@higschool_friends = Hash[]
current_user.friends.group_by(&:higschool) do | higschool, friends |
  @higschool_friends[higschool] = friends
end

@college_friends = Hash[]
current_user.friends.group_by(&:college) do | college, friends |
  @college_friends[college] = friends
end

@graduateschool_friends = Hash[]
current_user.friends.group_by(&:graduateschool) do | graduateschool, friends |
  @graduateschool_friends[graduateschool] = friends
end