Question

My app has user, photo, and state models with the following setup:

A state has many users.

A user has many photos.

I have the photos view set up as the homepage (application.root). I am trying to set up a select tag to filter the photos w.r.t the selected state.

In View:

<%= form_tag photos_path, :method => 'get' do%>
    <%= select("state", "name", State.all.collect(&:name)) %>
    <%= submit_tag "State" %>
<% end %>

In Controller:

if params[:state]
    statesmen = State.find_by_name(params[:state][:name]).users
    statesmen.each do |person|
        @photos = @photos <<  Photo.where(:user_id => person.id)
    end
end

Questions:

• Is there a better way to collect the photos?
• Currently, the photos table only has a user_id column. Should I just create a state_id column too?
• What’s wrong with the current approach?

Answer 1

So your associations are set up as follows:

state.rb

has_many :users

user.rb

belongs_to :state
has_many :photos

photo.rb

belongs_to :user

Just add to state.rb

has_many :photos, :through => :users

Then you can do just:

@photos = State.find_by_name(params[:state][:name]).photos