Again: please quote when replying! jrq wrote: > By "avoid supplementing the database end of things", I mean I want to > avoid adding more tables or databases to the database engine, > inserting an additional database layer.
But that's the right way to do it if you can't just get rid of the EAV schema. There is no benefit to avoiding DB objects just for the sake of avoiding DB objects. > > Yes, I'm currently intending to "munge" the unorganized fields into a > string, and deal with the parsing/processing at another stage. yes, > it's inefficient, but it's a relatively small amount of processing, It's not just inefficient; it will be inconvenient. Don't do it. > and hopefully it will get me to where I need to be within a short > amount of time, which is a factor in this situation. No. It will just complicate your life immensely. It may look simpler now, but once you try to do anything non-trivial, I think you'll find that it's a lot harder. > > By "not preserving record integrity", I mean that I am not updating > any of these records, it's read-only. I want to pull the data and > generate reports, both for screen and CSV stream. Then do it right and transform the data into a non-EAV representation once you pull it. > > Yes, most of the processing would be in the Model, not the Controller, > but since the model is not a good representation of the existing > database schema, there's going to be some fudging going on. Then write a model that *is* a good representation of it (perhaps supplementing or completely ditching ActiveRecord). > The > question is whether it's worth bothering to model the final data > output at all. Of course it is. That way you can manipulate it more easily than with string parsing. > > I know that helpers are for presentation formatting, which is why I > specified that the helper process would be for the "screen". > > Thanks. Best, -- Marnen Laibow-Koser http://www.marnen.org [email protected] -- 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.
