belongs_to multiple things

rubyonrails-talk
1

Nick Green wrote:

We have restaurants. Each restaurant has many menus. Each restaurant has many dishes. Every dish /must/ belong to a menu, and every dish /must/ belong to a restaurant (conceptually). The same dish cannot belong to 2 different menus or restaurants (a dish with all the same attributes could, but in the DB its a different dish).

I could be misreading your design specifications here, but it seems to me that restaurants would have many dishes through menus:

class Restaurant   has_many :menus, :dependent => :destroy   has_many :dishes, :through => :menus end

class Menu   belongs_to :restaurant   has_many :dishes, :dependent => :destroy end

class Dish   belongs_to :menu end

Then you could do things like: restaurant.menus restaurant.dishes menu.dishes dish.menu.restaurant

2

Precisely what I'm looking for. I thought I must be missing something, somehow reading books/tutorials all at once my brain just lets some information go, and I couldn't remember the pertinent info, but I could tell my way was not "railsish".

Sorry for the silly question and thanks for the answer :slight_smile:

Robert Walker wrote:

3

Thanks for asking the question, it helped me understand things better.