Survey table/model design in Rails

Question

I have some survey data which is currently stored in tables that are 100+ columns wide (one column per question). To simplify it, I've been thinking about making some models like:

• Survey
• Question
• Response

However, I'm not sure how to approach it through Rails because:

• I need nice views (better than autogenerating forms) for many surveys.
• I need validation (some are simple, but others are complex).
• I need to report pivoted data (e.g. one column per question). Besides loading everything up as an Array and then calling transpose, I'm not sure what to do here.

(Basically, there are still reasons why I'd want to treat each survey like a normal ActiveRecord model.)

Is this database design change worth making or am I overcomplicating things? Would a document database (such as mongodb) make this easier?