best way to model this

rubyonrails-talk
1

Let's say I have a car table that has many passengers so obviously the passenger table will have a foreign key to car. The Car model has_many Passengers. A car can have one and only one driver. What's the best way to model this relationship?

Hand coded get and set driver methods in the car class with one of the following keys. 1) a flag in the passenger table noting the passenger as driver 2) a passenger foreign key in car to note driver

Extend passenger to make a Driver model and do either:

3) Car belongs_to Driver

4) Car has_one Driver

Or something else?

Thanks!

2

I would do:

Passengers belong_to Car Car has_many Passengers Car has_one Driver, :class => Passenger

Dieter Lunn

3

I'd do something similar.

Actually if I had the freedom, I'd probably rename the class Passenger to something like Person since Driver and Passenger are really roles, not entities.

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base    belongs_to :car end

class Car < ActiveRecord::Base    belongs_to :driver, :class => ;person    has_many :passengers, :class => person end