Dear List,
This may not be rails unique but what is the best practice to validate the uniqueness of has_many associations. In particular the models are
class Word end
class PhraseComponent belongs_to :word belongs_to :dictionary_entry acts_as_list :scope => :dictionary_entry end
class DictionaryEntry has_many :phrase_components has_many :words, :through => :phrase_components end
Dictionary entries (words and phrases) are composed of words (which are uniq) and I want to check the same phrase occurs only once in the DictionaryEntry table.
Is there a better or more efficient way to do this than create and update a footprint of the word associations on dictionary entries? This means I would have a string field in the dictionary_entries table which is a concatenation of the associated words and would check the uniquness of that.
If we generalize the problem, we need to assure uniqueness of lists of arbitrary objects (where a list is via a join table), in that case the only representation that I can create on the list is the concatenation of ids of list items and check the uniqueness of this? I begin to think there must be a more canonical way to handle this. Any help appreciated
Viktor
I found someone asking the same question but no reply followed.
