Henry Happ wrote: > If it's not too bold to ask, could you please explain in a more concrete > way how to implement the structure describe in Rails?
Well... I'd start with a modeling exercise to figure out what are the attributes of a: A Prospective Student <- Maybe prospects are kept segregated from People for the sheer reason that you may have a bazillion prospective students of which you have comparatively few who are ever of concern to your application later (as students). An Applicant <- I think I'd use an Applications model (related to a Prospective Student), not the person as an applicant. An applicant is just a Prospective Student who sent in a bit of paper and a check... maybe more than once. If they become a Student, then relate the application data to the student record created from the prospective student. A Student, A Teacher, A Whatever - These models would have substantive amounts of data not shared by each other, or Person. A Mentor <- being a mentor may not be a type of person, but rather a name for a participant in an instance of a mentoring relationship between two people (I'm not sure being a mentor adds much information about the Person in addition to the existence of the relationship). Then distill those common attributes into a Person model. What's left over from each type of person you create would go into a new model for that perspective of a person. Each of those models would contain a person_id field to get back to the person (and use a "belongs_to :person" in the model.rb). Person.rb would have a has_one :something for each of these related models... something like: class ProspectiveStudent < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :applications end class Application < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :prospective_student belongs_to :student end class Person < ActiveRecord::Base has_one :student has_one :teacher end class Student < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :person has_one :application # in terms of applications, one got the person to become a student... when prospective student becomes student, current application gets flagged for student # table contains person_id : integer, and other info for students end class Teacher < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :person # table contains person_id : integer, and other info for teachers end Or something like that... -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
