Relationship in a Volunteers Project

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi! I'm new in Rails and I've started my own project this week. I'm working with Rails 2.0 and REST. I want to define some relationships but I'm stuck with REST routes and some other things.

My project aims to manage a team of volunteers. I designed three models, Month, User and Shifts. A Month have many users and many shifts. A User have many months and many shifts, while a Shift have one user and one month. I want to define this relationship in some way to work with this different routes.

/month/1/user/5/shifts/ Show shifts that belongs to month with id=1 and where user=5 /month/1/user/5/shift/3 Show shift with id=3 that belongs to month with id=1 and where user=5

/user/2/months Show months that belongs to user with id=2 /user/3/month/2 Show month with id=2 that belongs to user with id=3 /user/4/month/2/shifts Show shifts that belongs to user with id=4 and where month=2 /user/4/month/2/shift/3

I thought in this relationship but I can't understand completely how this will work.

#Model user.rb

has_many :shifts has_many :months, :through => :shifts

#Model month.rb

has_many :shifts has_many :users, :through => :shifts

#Model shifts.rb

belongs_to :month belongs_to :user

I know I've to define a middle table to manage this kind of relationship but I don't know how. Also I've to define nested routes, but the problem is how, because I want it can work with all this different routes. Moreover, I want to know how I should modify my Shifts controller, so when I'll create a new shift it will be related to a month an a user. Thanks in advance. I know this is such a general question, but I would appreciate any kind of help.

2

maybe try something like this for your routing

map.connect 'month/:month_id/user/:user_id/shifts', :controller => 'shifts', :action => 'index', :conditions => { :method => :get } map.connect 'month/:month_id/user/:user_id/shifts/:id', :controller => 'shifts', :action => 'show', :conditions => { :method => :get }

map.connect 'user/:user_id/months', :controller => 'months', :action => 'index', :conditions => { :method => :get } map.connect 'user/:user_id/months/:id', :controller => 'months', :action => 'show', :conditions => { :method => :get }

Then in your controller you will need to do something like: def index   @shifts = Shift.find(:all, :conditions => ['user_id = ? AND month_id = ?', [params[:user_id], params[:month_id]]) end

I strongly recommend that you take a look at rspec's default routing specs. This is easiest to do if you install RSpec into a new rails app, and then run 'ruby script/generate rspec_scaffold'. You definitely don't want to skip your routing tests when you are doing complex routing like this.

I could be wrong, but nested routes _might_ be more hassle than it is worth since this is a many to many relationship.

HTH

Daniel A. wrote:

3

Thanks for your help. I'll try it.