Rails Associations Help

Question

I have a Users model which has many Projects. But each Project are of different types. A WebApplication, DesktopApplication and so on. All these different types have their own specific fields and yet they share common fields which will be stored in the Projects table.

I have thought of this solution having multiple has_one to each of the Project types in the project model. Is this the way to go?

Answer 1

Your best bet is probably one User to many Projects, then have an "extended info" that's polymorphically associated. I think that an example would describe better than that sentence.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :projects
end

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  has_one :project_type, :as => :type
end

class ProjectType < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :type, :polymorphic => true
end

class WebApplication < ProjectType
  # fields here
end

class DesktopApplication < ProjectType
  # fields here
end

@project.type = WebApplication.new
@otherproject.type = DesktopApplication.new

Unfortunately I can't test this to guarantee that it works, but I think I got everything correct :)