David A. Black wrote in post #712598: > Hi -- > > On Wed, 6 Aug 2008, Shawn .. wrote: > > > The has/belongs semantics are, indeed, not always a perfect fit for > the way things relate when we describe them in English. For example, I > remember coming up with an example once where I ended up with a Club > belonging to a Member (or something like that; I'm not remembering > exactly), whereas normally we'd say "He belongs to that club." > > My advice would be to use it as is for a while. If you want two-way > has_many's, then just use has_many. Remember that the main point of > associations, in any case, is that they generate methods for you. It's > nice to have them as close as possible to the domain you're modeling, > but it's often not very close since "has" and "belongs to" are not > general terms for expressing every possible connection between two > things. > > In the end, I think it's better to keep the number of association > methods down, partly because it helps when it comes to learning how > the associations themselves behave -- which ones trigger automatic > saves, and when, and things like that. > > > David
I am very grateful for this response. I, too was having a bit of difficulty earlier when the "English just wasn't making sense". See, I have an Event model and a DressCode model and I want to say that Event has_one DressCode, but I put the foreign key (dress_code_id) in the Event model (just as I would in my usual SQL/PHP ways. It turned out that I had to say DressCode has_many Events and Event belongs_to DressCode. Unorthodox but it works because now I can run Event.dress_code and I get the result i'm looking for. Rails is so advanced that I sometimes forget that it is still just a programming language and, as you said, can't always be semantically correct all the time when illustrating real world relationships. I spent a while searching, ended up on this thread and I finally got my head around it. To the original poster - just take the advice and do what needs to be done in order to satisfy the rails convention. Reading your code might be weird, but that's nothing that a few comments can't fix ;) -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. -- 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.
