Question

It has been almost a week since I’m trying to find a solution to my confusion… Here it is:

I have a Program model.
I have a ProgramCategory model.
I have a ProgramSubcategory model.

Let’s make it more clear:

ProgramCategory ======> Shows, Movies, 
ProgramSubcategory ===> Featured Shows, Action Movies
Program ==============> Lost, Dexter, Game of Thrones etc...

I want to able to associate each of these models with eachother. I’ve got what I want to do particularly with many-to-many association. I have a categories_navigation JOIN model/table and all of my other tables are connected to it. By this way, I can access all fields of all of these models.

BUT…

As you know, has_many :through style associations are always plural. There is nothing such as has_one :through or belongs_to through. BUT I want to play with SINGULAR objects, NOT arrays. A Program has ONLY ONE Subcategory and ONLY ONE Category. I’m just using a join table to only make connection between those 3. For example, at the moment I can access program.program_categories[0].title but I want to access it such like program.program_category for example.

How can I have ‘has_many :through’s abilities but has_one’s singular usage convention all together? 😐

P.S: My previous question was about this situation too, but I decided to start from scratch and learn about philosophy of associations. If you want so you may check my previous post here: How to access associated model through another model in Rails?

Answer 1

Why a join table where you have a direct relationship? In the end, a program belongs to a subcategory, which in turn belongs to one category. So no join table needed.

class Program < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :subcategory   # references the "subcategory_id" in the table
  # belongs_to :category, :through => :subcategory
  delegate :category, :to => :subcategory
end

class Subcategory < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :programs
  belongs_to :category    # references the "category_id" in the table
end

class Category < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :subcategories
  has_many :programs, :through => :subcategories
end

Another point of view is to make categories a tree, so you don’t need an additional model for “level-2” categories, you can add as many levels you want. If you use a tree implementation like “closure_tree” you can also get all subcategories (at any level), all supercategories, etc

In that case you skip the Subcategory model, as it is just a category with depth=2

class Program < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :category   # references the "category_id" in the table

  scope :in_categories, lambda do |cats|
    where(:category_id => cats)  # accepts one or an array of either integers or Categories
  end
end

class Category < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_tree
  has_many :programs
end

Just an example on how to use a tree to filter by category. Suppose you have a select box, and you select a category from it. You want to retrieve all the object which correspond to any subcategory thereof, not only the category.

class ProgramsController < ApplicationController

  def index

    @programs = Program.scoped
    if params[:category].present?
      category = Category.find(params[:category])
      @programs = @programs.in_categories(category.descendant_ids + [category.id])
    end

  end

end

Tree-win!