ActiveRecord question

Rails
1

Hello there, newbie speaking

Let’s say I have:

class Office
has_many :holidays #(just a list of dates when the office is closed)
has_many :doctors #doctors who work in the office
end

class Doctor
belongs_to :office
has_many :holidays #(additional dates when this doctor is not
available)
end

class Holiday (has a office_id, doctor_id and a date field)
end

From the app standpoint I would like to be able to allow the
administrator to set office-wide closed dates, but to allow an
individual doctor to augment that list with additional dates he/she
won’t be available in.

What is the best/most elegant way to retrieve the merged list of
holidays for a doctor?

I know I could retrieve the Office holidays in the doctor model and
merge it with the Doctor’s holidays, but I was wondering if there was a
more activerecord/rails-specific pattern that I might be missing to
allow one DB query with the ‘inherited’ holidays from the Office…

Thanks

Enrico.

2

I don’t know if this might work, but you could give it a shot.

class Doctor
belongs_to :office
has_many :holidays, :through => Office, :conditions => [‘doctor_id =
NULL OR doctor_id = ?’,self.id]
end

There’s a very good chance this might not work, so perhaps instead of
an association, maybe you could use a named_scope instead.

On Apr 10, 11:57 pm, Enrico Brunetta <rails-mailing-l…@andreas-