I'm fairly new to Ruby on Rails, and am having trouble figuring out how to do this. I have a model called Organization. I want to set things up so that an org can have sub-orgs (which can have sub-orgs themselves).
Can anyone point me to a good example or explanation (or provide one directly) so I can get an idea of how to do this?
Thanks!
I've just been doing this myself with systems and sub-systems.
In the system model I have:
has_many :sub_systems, :class_name => "System", :foreign_key => "system_id", :dependent=>:nullify
Then you can refer to the system.sub_systems
I also have code to prevent loops which will go around forever if you traverse the system-sub-system tree.
def validate errors.add(:sub_systems, "Cannot be a subsystem of itself.") if all_subs.include?(self) end
def all_subs(subs = ) self.sub_systems.each do |s| unless subs.include?(s) subs << s s.all_subs(subs) end end subs end
Hope that helps.
Look into the :as and :source options for the has_many and belongs_to associations, they should be able to do what you need.
Good luck!
I forgot this - you also have to have
belongs_to :system