OK Thanks - I've had another think about it but I'd still appreciate any insight if possible. I had wondered if my data model is wrong but I don't think so, it's rather simple.
Users have names and Names belong to users. It has to be like this as Users can individually sort their names (so they have a position attribute), therefore while the name Fred might be in the database several times, it's a different record each time and needs to be as it's "owned" by different users who may have it as a different position in their respective lists - I think it's ok to have it as I have it, but it seems to make collecting my stats a little more difficult. Here's another way of looking at it, the output/result I need. Given the schema above I need the result of the query/scope/find_all_by to look something like this. If we've got records like Freddy Freddy Mary Rod Rod Rod Jane I need a method to return all this so I have access to it in my controller and then view. Rod (3, male) Freddy (2, male) Jane (1, female) Mary (1, female) So that's unique and with this order.. 1. By occurences (most common first) 2. By name in alpha order I need access to the name and gender attributes as well as the count (which clearly is not an attribute). What would be the best way for this to be returned even (an array? a hash?) The end game is so that I can easily query my data sets and work out the 10 most popular names across the users. At a later date I'd also love to be able to move on from this and find stuff that's "trending", for example what's changing position the most in a given time period or what's most popular this week, last week, last month, last year. All that stuff and variants thereof. Thanks for your help so far and most grateful for any further insight. -- 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.
