A topic on a category of a subforum really belongs_to what?

Rails
1

Suppose you have a forum with many sub-forums, and each sub-forum has
many categories (or sub-sub-forums), and each category may or may not
have many sub-categories (or sub-sub-sub-forums).

Will a topic belong to the sub-category AND category AND sub-forum; or
only to a sub-category, that will in turn belong to a category that will
in turn belong to a sub-forum?

2

In parts this may depend on the table structure.
I would avoid having too much tables here (forum + category) and
if possible go for a single table.

But in general avoid duplicate data. If a topic is linked to
a sub category and this sub category is already linked
to a category, there is not much need in adding another
field to the topic. That would just bring the risk, that the
data gets inconsistent if you need to relink the subforum
structure.

You should provide a function that for a given forum gets the ids of
all subforums (including sub sub forums, categories…) and
then get all the topics linked with those forum ids

3

I’d go for self-referencing Forum and Category, to allow for
children / grand / etc in the same tables.
After that, where the Topic belongs to is a matter of how do you
traverse the tree.

4

@Thorsten — I had figured that as well, so I went looking for info on
that and found out about this neat “model:references” bit you can
include in the script/generate.

@Klaus — Could you demonstrate?

For example, I was reading a tutorial earlier in which the author
demonstrated that you can make a Forum “has_many :posts, :through =>
:topics”, but you can’t make it “has_many :users, :through => :posts”,
because the relationship won’t go that deep.

So I wonder if it’s even possible for a Forum to have sub-categories
through categories through sub-forums.