I'm pondering a way of representing a scenario without too much fiddling with the database. I'm 90% happy with it, but have one problem (where I probably just don't know the right AR approach to use).
I have a "people" table, from which records are displayed depending on whether they are new leads, exisiting customers, or just contacts (maybe reps at stores). I'm keeping them in one DB table, but I don't want to use STI, as a single person *might* be more than one "type". Here's the reasoning: A Person can be flagged as "new lead". A Person can have Orders (which makes them a customer). A NewLead can have Orders - for instance trial packs that their sales person has sent them - which makes them a customer as well as a lead. A Person record can exist, and be neither a Customer or NewLead (I'm calling these guys "contacts" for now, but they might as easily be Foos or Bars...) I want to be able to access the records using named_scopes, as, of course, I want to be able to chain other scopes - so named_scopes are essential (so I can get all the NewLeads for a given sales person, or all the Contacts with a given surname, etc) So I've got this structure: class Person < ActiveRecord::Base # ...Person stuff end class NewLead < Person default_scope :conditions => "people.new_lead = 1" # ... simple condition to return only new leads end class Customer < Person default_scope :group => "people.id", :joins => :orders # ... returns me unique instances (thanks to the :group) of just those people who have any order records end class Contact < Person #... my problem... what does my default scope need to be to return me people *without* orders, and with the "new_lead" flag set to zero? end The logic for NewLead and Customer is working perfectly - if I have a Person with id=123 who has no orders, but new_lead set to "1", calling "NewLead.find(123)" gives me a valid NewLead record, but "Customer.find(123)" gives me a "record not found error" - just what I want to happen. Then if that person has an order placed for them, both of the finds returns a valid record. But how to return records with no Orders.... ? I'm thinking that I may need something along the lines of: default_scope :conditions => "people.id not in (select distinct people.id from people joins orders on orders.person_id = people.id) and people.new_lead = 0" But that seems ugly. Any suggestions for neater ways? -- 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.
