employments example using Rich associations :through

rubyonrails-talk
#1

What is the best way to deal with this model in rails 2.0 +

class School < ActiveRecord::Base
# school model has a name attribute
  has_many :employments
  has_many :teachers , :through=> :employments
end

class Teacher < ActiveRecord::Base
# teacher model has a name attribute
  has_many :employments
  has_many :schools , :through=> :employments

end

class Employment < ActiveRecord::Base
# employment has a start_date and an end_date
# end_date is null if the teacher is currently employed
# by that school

  belongs_to :school
  belongs_to :teacher
end

What is the best way to code this, so that I can do the following :

teacher.schools.current.name

teacher.schools.past[0].name
teacher.schools.past[0].start_date
teacher.schools.past[0].end_date

school.teachers.current[0].name
school.teachers.current[0].start_date

school.teachers.past[0].name

Thanks

Something like :

user.favorite_articles.each do |fav|

???

#2

What is the best way to deal with this model in rails 2.0 +

class School < ActiveRecord::Base
# school model has a name attribute
has_many :employments
has_many :teachers , :through=> :employments
end

class Teacher < ActiveRecord::Base
# teacher model has a name attribute
has_many :employments
has_many :schools , :through=> :employments

end

class Employment < ActiveRecord::Base
# employment has a start_date and an end_date
# end_date is null if the teacher is currently employed
# by that school

belongs_to :school
belongs_to :teacher
end

What is the best way to code this, so that I can do the following :

You can do this with association proxies, so for teachers, something
like

has_many :schools, :through => :employments do
  def current
    find :first, :conditions => 'end_date IS NULL'
  end
  def past
    find :all, :conditions => 'end_date is NOT NULL'
  end
end

would probably do the trick (just typed in my mail client, so you may
have to do some fiddling to get this to work.

Fred