Newbie - Question on Parent child updating

rubyonrails-talk
1

All,

I've just started Rails and Ruby a week or so ago. Please forgive me for my ignorance. I started writing a small test application to test some of my new knowledge and have hit a wall. Would like some best practices.

I have 3 tables, as below...

CREATE TABLE `carts` (   `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,   `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,   `quantity` int(11) NOT NULL,   PRIMARY KEY (`id`)

CREATE TABLE `orders` (   `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,   `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,   `address` varchar(255) NOT NULL,   PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=2 ;

CREATE TABLE `order_details` (   `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,   `name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,   `quantity` int(11) NOT NULL,   `order_id` int(11) NOT NULL,   PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=4 ;

model cart.rb class Cart < ActiveRecord::Base end

model order.rb class Order < ActiveRecord::Base   has_many :order_details end

model order_detail.rb class OrderDetail < ActiveRecord::Base   belongs_to :order end

In the carts table holds a shop cart with product details. For the ease of implementation, I've refrained from putting relationships with a product table or any session. Let's just say, the field name "name" is the product name and "quantity" holds the quantity.

What I want to do is when the order is created via a form with the "name" and "address" fields, it will create 1. The order in the order table 2. Utilize the relationship in the model and update/create the order_details from the contents of the cart table.

My question is if there is a simpler way to do the following with a more ruby like way. I've read in a book that you can do a @order.order_detail << @cart based on the code below.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

What I've done in the controller is this ...

order_controller.rb class OrderController < ApplicationController   def new   end   def create     @cart = Cart.find(:all)     @order = Order.new(params[:order])     @order.save!     @cart.each do |cart|       @order_details = OrderDetail.new       @order_details.name = cart.name       @order_details.quantity = cart.quantity       @order_details.order_id = @order.id       @order_details.save!     end   end end