Seems like what would work is a habtm relationships (and related tables) between your Tutorial, and your Example and Question models. That way, an example can belong to different tutorials, and a tutorial can have multiple examples. (And the same with questions.)
You could define a Section model which belongs_to your Tutorial model and has a position attribute so you can determine the order.
In your Tutorial model has_many :sections , :order => ‘sections.position ASC’
You then set up your Example and Question models so that they have a polymorphic has_many association with the Section model.
In Section: belongs_to :sectionable , :polymorphic => true
In Question or Example:
has_many :sections , :as => :sectionable
Now you can say:
@tutorial.sections.each do |section|
section=section.sectionable
case section
when Example
puts section.some_example_method
when Question
puts section.some_question_method
else
puts 'what!'
end
end
Has the nice benefit that you can recycle your examples and questions in next year’s tutorial if you’re lazy 
Daniel Bush wrote:
has_many :examples, :as => :sections And get: sections for each tutorial, also, to make sure they appear in the right order.
Does that make sense? I think single table inheritance might do this, but I'm planning on using examples and questions for a bunch of other things, so I don't think it would work that well. I'm thinking about defining a whole new "section" model, and using that, but I don't know yet.
I must be missing something here, but given that you have separate models [Tutorial, Question, Example] then what's wrong with:
Tutorial << ActiveRecord::Base has_many :questions has_many :example end
Question << << ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :tutoiral end
Example << ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :tutorial end
Then given that Ruby is a duck typed language just put the questions and examples together in one array and as long as you stick to the common API for your ToC, or whatever it will just work:
toc = tutorial.questions.concat(tutorial.examples)
toc.each do |item| puts item.class puts item.name end
Robert Walker wrote:
Tutorial << ActiveRecord::Base has_many :questions has_many :example end
Oops, sorry for the typo. Should be: has_many :examples
I might be missing something too and over-complicating things. The Section model in my previous post has a position attribute and allows Chris to create a tutorial of ordered sections where each section is linked to an Example or Question.
I’m not sure how you guarantee that with your version, although maybe with some effort you could. Because the Examples and Questions are has_many Sections, they are also reusable in a future tutorial; it is the sections that are tied specifically to a given tutorial instance.
Anyway, it seemed like the Section abstraction was a nice way to show off polymorphic routes.
oh crap, I mean “polymorphic associations”.
The word polymorphic is getting too polymorphic…
Not sure how experienced you are with polymorphic assocs. I omitted some details chief of which is that you need two fields in your sections table: sectionable_id and sectionable_type. There’s a shortcut for doing this in a rails migration t.references :sectionable , :polymorphic => true or something like that.
Yeah, I was able to figure it out and everything's working great, just like I wanted. Thanks again!
Daniel Bush wrote:
