Question

This is more of a general design question, but it will be implemented in RoR to which I am very much a newcomer. Also, I think this is my first question so please be gentle 🙂

The scenario is:

I have an Asset model. Each asset is located in a particular room, so I would also like a one-to-many relationship with a Location model. Simple enough. However, some rooms (Locations) also go by an alias (eg. 123 is aka Library). When a user wants to update information about a particular Asset, I would like them to be able to just search without worrying about whether they know the exact room number, and be shown a list of assets in that room.

To clarify, there could be more than one alias.

So the question is:

Would you recommend an Alias model for which a Location would have a one-to-many relationship? Or, would a self-referential (sort-of hierarchical) association be better? Or something else maybe? From what I can envisage, the former would require querying columns on different tables for the same sort of information, and the latter just doesn’t seem right (an Alias is not the same as a Location).

Answer 1

This might be a good area for using the tagging plugin acts-as-taggable-on:

https://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on

In your model you can do:

class Location < ActiveRecord::Base   
  acts_as_taggable_on :aliases 
end

Then in your controller do:

Location.tagged_with("library", :on => :aliases)