RoR DB design question.

rubyonrails-talk
#1

I am VERY new to the RoR game, but quickly becoming a convert.

I am doing a discussion board application in RoR just to learn RoR.
You all are very familiar with the discussion board domain. Someone
starts a new thread, someone comments on that thread and or starts a
new thread and so on...

I have a table called comments. This table follows all the Railisms
but I have a few questions. What would I call a field in the comments
table that refers BACK to itself (ie the comments table)? This is for
child comments. This would maintain a child/parent relationship for
each of the comments.

Then would I add
belongs_to :comment
has_many :comments

in the comments.rb

Thanks.

#2

Hi, I would highly recommend going through the AWDwRv2 before
embarking on your application. This would help you get the necessary
foundation to begin rails development. Anyway, the term or phrase
that you're looking for is called a self referential relationship.

Good luck,

-Conrad

#3

And the specific column you’re looking for is called comment_id (you can actually name it anything you want via the :foreign_key => ‘some_other_column_name_here’, but the default is comment_id)