To me, there are two possibilities: either switching to a less- normalized design (serialized columns) or a different database idea entirely (CouchDB, for instance).
I haven't used CouchDB personally, but check it out: http://couchdb.apache.org/ (the main project) http://github.com/arunthampi/activecouch/tree/master (an ActiveRecord- like wrapper) It's a "document database", which can store arbitrary key-value pairs for each "document". Sounds like it might be a better match for what you're trying to do. -- Staying within Rails, if you don't have a need to search by specific column values (which you haven't mentioned), you could just store the data in a single serialized field: Sheets - id (int) - name (string) Columns - id (int) - sheet_id (int) - column_group_id (int) - name (string) ColumnGroups - id (int) - name (string) Data - id (int) - sheet_id (int) - tool_number (string) - row_data (text, serialized) Then keep the data in Data#row_data, as a Hash of (column_name => value) [or column_id => value] pairs. That would keep all of the ToolNumber stuff grouped together. BTW, if you need columns in a particular order, take a look at acts_as_list - it should work great for what you're doing here. -- In conclusion (this has gotten rather long), I'd recommend first that you take a look at CouchDB. It seems like a much better match to the idea you're looking for. The serialized-column approach is a little more of a hack, but should work if nothing else is possible. --Matt Jones --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
