Question

I’ve read so many Rails books/tutorials, but when it comes time to actually make the app, I keep tripping over myself, so I’m trying this little exercise to help me get it better.

I have an app with 3 classes (Link, Url, Visit) that have associations defined between them, such as has_one, belongs_to etc. This allows me to call methods like Link.url

If I were to convert this into an app with a single model, is it possible to create the convenience methods (such as Link.url) even though there are no relationships between models, because there is only one model.

This might not be the ‘Rails way’ but if you answer this question it’ll help me get it more.
I guess another way to ask this is, do the Rails associations only exist because the tab

Thanks

Answer 1

Models exist to represent tables in a database. If you have 3 different conceptual objects, then you need 3 different models. Keeping those objects separate and in different tables/models is essential to good programming in any language. The relations are there to help you understand the correlation of each object to the others.

If you think all of data from each of the models can be represented in one table sensibly, then combine them in to one model with a name that encompasses all of the data. If you choose this option, you’ll use columns for that one table which represent each of the pieces of data you need. Those column names come free in the model when you create the migration. A table with a column named “url” on a model named “Hit” could be used like this:

Hit.first.url