Rails data modelling with has_many through

Hi, I am building an expense tracker application and I am in middle of data modelling. I have a Users table. Each user will log his expenses with expense type and income with income type. So I need to know how can we set up associations for it. I have User, Expense, Income and UserTransaction models. Expense and Income will have following fields id, date, category, amount, description, user_id, currency

I am not sure whether I need UserTransaction table also. But my business requirement is as follows

I should be able to get all expenses/income of a user with date range and also with category

I should also be able to get all transactions occurred with date range.

I notice that the last time you asked basically the same question you did not appear to reply or offer thanks for the help offered, which is not good manners, unless I missed the post. However I will try to help again. See below,

Hi,

I am building an expense tracker application and I am in middle of data modelling. I have a Users table. Each user will log his expenses with expense type and income with income type. So I need to know how can we set up associations for it.

I have User, Expense, Income and UserTransaction models.

Expense and Income will have following fields

id, date, category, amount, description, user_id, currency

There is a big clue there. If two tables have the same fields then almost certainly it should just be one table. Possibly call it transactions and use different categories to distinguish between income and expenses.

I am not sure whether I need UserTransaction table also. But my business requirement is as follows

I should be able to get all expenses/income of a user with date range and also with category

I should also be able to get all transactions occurred with date range.

I also don't see any need for a UserTransaction table. I think you just need User has_many transactions, Transaction belongs_to user.

Colin

Hi Colin,

First of all Sorry for neglecting the previous comments. I didnt notice that i had reply for the previous posts which I posted. Thats the reason I posted it once again here. Thanks for your suggestions.

BTW I was thinking whether polymorphic association would really be nice for my scenario

I would look into the concept of a single table inheritance for a transactions table…you’d have to add an extra attribute/column that would be ‘transaction’ type to indicate whether it’s an expense or income, but this should be able to be done with a simple 1 to many relationship - a user has many transactions - Single Table Inheritance is great for things like this and Rails handles it very easily.

Hi Colin,

First of all Sorry for neglecting the previous comments. I didnt notice that i had reply for the previous posts which I posted. Thats the reason I posted it once again here. Thanks for your suggestions.

BTW I was thinking whether polymorphic association would really be nice for my scenario

Why? What advantage would that have over the simple setup I suggested?

Colin

I would look into the concept of a single table inheritance for a transactions table...you'd have to add an extra attribute/column that would be 'transaction' type to indicate whether it's an expense or income, but this should be able to be done with a simple 1 to many relationship - a user has many transactions - Single Table Inheritance is great for things like this and Rails handles it very easily.

Whether the added complication of STI is worth the benefits in this case depends on what code differences there are between income and expenses. I would start off with the simple solution and if it becomes apparent that STI would be beneficial then refactor it at that point.

Colin

I notice, looking back through your previous posts over more than a year you have rarely responded to replies here.

Colin

It would be nice if this thread got back on topic with the OPs problem. We are all here to help.