Displaying two different data sets at the same time.

Thanks to some help from earlier posters, I've been moving along with my test application. I did run into one more stumbling block, though.

Say I have two sets of headlines, news and sports, the table structures are slightly different but each has a headline, writer and date.

In the controller: @news = News.find(:all) @sports = Sports.find(:all)

Getting they to display like this isn't a problem.

News News Headline 1 - Writer 08-01-2008 News Headline 2- Writer 07-31-2008 News Headline 3- Writer 06-05-2008

Sports Sports Headline 1- Writer 07-30-2008 Sports Headline 2- Writer 06-16-2008

My question is this: How do you structure the loop to go through both arrays and display based on date so that the result could be two, intertwined lists. Example:

News Headline 1 - Writer 08-01-2008 News Headline 2 - Writer 07-31-2008 Sports Headline 1 - Writer 07-30-2008 Sports Headline 2 - Writer 06-16-2008 News Headline 3 - Writer 06-05-2008

Any help or starting points would be sincerely appreciated.

Elliot Chyba wrote:

My question is this: How do you structure the loop to go through both arrays and display based on date so that the result could be two, intertwined lists. Example:

News Headline 1 - Writer 08-01-2008 News Headline 2 - Writer 07-31-2008 Sports Headline 1 - Writer 07-30-2008 Sports Headline 2 - Writer 06-16-2008 News Headline 3 - Writer 06-05-2008

Any help or starting points would be sincerely appreciated.

you could use polymorphic associations? http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Associations/ClassMethods.html

your class definitions might look lke class Article < ActiveRecord::Base   belongs_to :content, :polymorphic => end class News < ActiveRecord::Base   has_one :article, as => :content end class Sports < ActiveRecord::Base   has_one :article, as => :content end

Also, refer to Polymorphic Associations section in Chapter 18.4 Joining to Multiple Tables of Agile Web Development with Rails (third edition). If you dont have this book, i HIGHLY recommend you get it from

aa aa wrote: slight typo, missed the "true