Question

My model can be described as following:

One Forum has many Threads. One Thread has many Comments.

Data is not denormalized; i.e. Threads has FK only leading to Forum and Comments has FK leading only to Thread.

What will be “The Rails Way” of selecting specific Threads and then rendering Comments in a template grouped by the thread they belong to?

Answer 1

Read Active Record Associations here.

Define has_many and belongs_torelationships for your Forum<> Thread and Thread<>Comment

Querying using rails interface would be quite easy for you then. Refer here

Selecting commnets of specific threads(grouped by it)

Comment.where('thread_id in ?',[specific_thread_ids_to_search]).order('thread_ids')