Question

I’m looking at statistics on “Cars” & “Trucks.” I have a model for each which tidies up the raw data and returns it in a common format.

Then in the view I have a single “Vehicles” chart which integrates data from the two sources.

Where in my application should this integration happen?

• In the Vehicles controller?
• In some kind of read-only Vehicles model not backed by a database table?
• In lib?
• …?

Answer 1

You can do this in a couple of different ways. You can have a Vehicle class which cars and trucks inherit from Cars << Vehicle Trucks << Vehicle

You can have only a Vehicle table, and have a VehicleType column with different types for cars and trucks

You can do it in the controller / view where, if the data is formatted the same, in the controller you can have all the cars and trucks into an @vehicle variable that gets passed to a view.

If cars and trucks are essentially the same, I would use a VehicleType column in the same table. If you need them to have the same methods, but those methods are implemented differently, I would use a Vehicle base class and have cars and trucks inherit from that.