Hi all,
This weekend I started coding my first Rails app. So far I'm really liking it; in just 2 days my app is already taking pretty good shape. However, I have a couple of questions regarding ActiveRecord that I hope people can help me with.
I'm creating a 'financial application' where there are groups of users. Within each group, the users can transfer money to other users in the same group. Each transfer can involve an unspecified number of group members. I use four models: Group, User, Entry and Transfer:
class Group < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :users end
class User < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :group has_many :entries has_many :transfers, :through => :entries end
class Entry < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user belongs_to :transfer end
class Transfer < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :entries has_many :users end
In effect each transfer is linked to one group and a group can have many transfers. I tried using has_many :through to link Group and Transfer, but that does not seem to work. Is it at all possible to do it this way? I could think of two other options to get the transfers linked to a group: 1) Use has_many :transfers with finder_sql set to a big 'inner join' query 2) Create a group_id field in the transfers table
I went with option 1 initially, because then I'm not storing redundant information in my database. On the other hand, it feels like I'm sacrificing a lot of Rails goodness this way, like being able to use :order or pagination. What is the common way of solving this problem, is there a third option perhaps?
Another question I have is when I list information about a transfer. I would like to show for a transfer, how much each user paid or received. This is very easy to do by using transfer.users and then for each user I call user.entry. However, in this way I'm doing a lot of database calls for each transfer. Since this is mostly a personal test application, it doesn't really need to scale, but it still feels a bit wasteful to me. What do other people think?
Thanks very much, Hencq
