So I have a rails project that I'm working on and I have it doing what I want, but I'm fairly certain what I've done is at best a horrendous hack.
I was wondering if anyone could give me a very general suggestion for my associations.
Here's the overview of my project:
The site will have document templates (I'll actually call them patterns in the app because 'template' apparently is a reserved word in rails), which will have certain options. Other users can create documents based on the template using a form with questions based on the options from the template.
The way I'm doing I have implemented it right now is as follows: Each template has many documents. Each template has a field storing the options as a string. Each document belong to a template. Each document has many options. When a document is created, the options string from the template is parsed and the values are used to create new options for the document. Then I have a form that asks questions based on each of the options for the document. Like I said above, I'm certain this is a hilariously awful hack.
The more I think about it, the more I feel like that that templates should have many options and have many documents. That way I could set the options up when the template is created. But then I don't know how to associate those options back to a document so that I can create a form that will fill out the template's options to be used in the document.
I think I may be missing something not so obvious. I'm sure a lot of this is my inexperience with things like polymorphic associations, and/ or self-referential associations and/or single table inheritance.
Anyway, I would appreciate some very top-down suggestions.
-Alexis M.
