Question

I’m not sure the title really explains correctly what i’m trying to do so forgive me. I have a table called clients for an invoicing system i’ve built. I also have tables called projects and invoices.

Here’s an example (not the actual columns in the tables, just for an example) of my database structure.

Clients
    id
    name
    description
    archive

Projects
    id
    client_id
    name
    description
    archive

Projects
    id
    client_id
    project_id
    name
    description
    archive

I have created the ability to archive a given invoice, project, or client independently. However, i wanted to see what the best way to do this would be if i wanted to have say the projects and invoices for a client to be automatically marked as archived when i archive the client. My process would be this:

• Archiving a client would archive the client, all projects with that client id, and all invoices with that same client id.
• Archiving a project would archive the project and all invoices with that project id.
• Archiving an invoice just archives the invoice itself

NOTE: by “archived” i mean the archive bit gets flipped to 1 instead of 0 (not archived / active).

By the way, the way that you archive something is on the edit screen there is an “Archive?” checkbox that you would check off to archive the item.

I know that in my edit action in my controller i can just say something like if archive == 1 then run additional sql update statements to update dependent items else @object.save to just save the data for the edited item.

My question?

Is there a better way to do this? Is the way i mentioned generally the best practice? I am already using :dependent => :destroy elsewhere in the model to delete rows in associated tables when a “parent” item is deleted. Is there something pre-built in to Rails that will allow me to mark things like i am trying to do through the relationships of the tables?

Thanks for any help with this! Hope i explained the problem and question well enough, but let me know if you have questions.

Answer 1

A better way would be to create a after_update on the Client and Project model :

class Client < ActiveRecord::Base
  after_update :archive_check

  private
  def archive_check
    projects.each{|p| p.archive = self.archive; p.save} if self.archive_changed?
  end
end

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  after_update :archive_check

  private
  def archive_check
    invoices.each{|i| i.archive = self.archive; i.save} if self.archive_changed?
  end
end

So when you save a client, the archive_check is triggered. And then if archived, it’ll update all the related projects. Since you update the projects, the archive_check will also be triggered in the Project model for each invoice this time.