User Created Tables

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a situation that is a little more complicated than I'm used to dealing with. I thought I would see what others thought before I made a decision spent a few days and realized I had done something stupid and had to start a re-write :wink:

I have been asked to create a web-based course evaluation system for the Community College I work for. My first response is: No problem, that won't take long at all. Then I learn that a committee gets together every year to evaluate the evaluation process (apparently they like to change the questions. The problem I see is maintaining the relevance of old data after the committee has decided to make changes to the evaluation form.

I'm thinking I will have to perform some sort of dynamic table creation so that the question/answer data on old evaluations will still be sane if the committee makes changes to the questions/format of the evaluations in the future.

Does anyone have a better idea for future proofing this thing?

Thanks, Glen

2

I have been asked to create a web-based course evaluation system for the Community College I work for. My first response is: No problem, that won't take long at all. Then I learn that a committee gets together every year to evaluate the evaluation process (apparently they like to change the questions. The problem I see is maintaining the relevance of old data after the committee has decided to make changes to the evaluation form.

Have a questions table, with a column for year? Then instead of using an association against the whole questions table, make your associations limited to questions in the current year? That'd work if the evaluations are in the middle of the year. Otherwise you'd need an application setting to set the current eval year.

    has_many :current_questions, :class_name => 'Question', conditions => ["year = ?", DateTime.now.year]

Then you could have your current evaluations done against that association, and your reporting / previous years still access the base

3

Thanks Jim,

That makes perfect logical sense. I'm obviously not that with it today :wink: