Hi, thanks for reading this post. At the moment, I am thinking about the following problem:
Let's assume the following situation: I've got two entity types called "User" and "Group". Each entity type got some attributes, let's think about "name" and "password" for "User" and "name" as well as "type" for "Group". Those attributes are not really essential for my problem description. So now we have: User + name + password Group + name + type We can also create relations between those entities, for example: membership(Gx, Uy), which tells us that user y is a member of group x. As all users can join multiple groups, we could just create an intermediate join table to model this for our relational database, so far, that's all right, there are no other reasonable solutions, as far as I know. Now, let's assume you could dynamically add an arbitrary number of attributes, which can of course also be just foreign keys, to each entity and that this is also supported by your database system. This is the case, I am dealing with and it brings in some new thoughts about modeling the relation between "User" and "Group". If we look at the relation "membership" again, you could also think: Well, somehow, "member" could be an attribute of "Group", so we would say: Group + name + type + member_fk_1 (or user_fk, that's not essential here) + member_fk_2 (also the naming is not essential) ... And you could say, well: the fact, that a user is a member of a group, could also be represented by further "User" attributes: User + name + password + group_fk_1 (the naming again is not essential here) + group_fk_2 ... The fact, that you can add as many fields as you want, makes both solutions possible. In fact, only one entity should save the membership information, as we are following the dry principle. What to do now? How would you argue? Should I use a join model anyhow or should I really decide to model the membership in the second way? Maybe: Is there a formal approach to decide this? There are other examples, where I have got to model some kind of composition: in this case I have got entities which are components of other entities, which only can exist through out these associations. In this case, it is somehow more intuitive to model the foreign keys directly as attributes not using a join model. Thanks for you suggestions! Cheers, ms --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
