Self referential Models

rubyonrails-talk
#1

If I have a Person model, and every person has a parent, that is in
fact another person, can I still use the belongs_to and has_many
methods?

A simple database migration might look like this

      t.column :name, :string
      t.column :parent, :integer

So every person only has a name and some people have parents.

I have written some methods that find a person's parent and children:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  def find_children
    Person.find_all_by_parent(self.id)
  end

  def find_parent
    Person.find_by_id(self.parent)
  end
end

These seem to work fine, but I was wondering if there was a neater way
to do this?

Thanks,

DAZ

#2

Thanks for this Shai,

acts_as_tree is exactly what I was looking for. I might also use
acts_as_list also.

Thanks for the other links too ... I'm sure they will make some
interesting and useful reading.

DAZ