Associations: Am I thinking right?

Rails
1

Hello everyone,

I just read the entire Associations page on the RoR Guide, and I’m
wanting to see if I can run it by the pros to make sure I have it down
right for my particular project. As a first test project I’m doing a
simple Issue Tracker.

The tracker has the following models:

Projects
Tickets
Milestones
Components
Types
Severities

Each Project will have many Tickets
Each Ticket will have one of the following, Milestone, Component,
Type, Severity

From reading the RoR Association Guide I have guessed that this is the
best method using Milestone as the example:

Project: has_many: tickets, has_many: milestones, :through => tickets
Ticket: belongs_to: project, belongs_to: milestone
Milestone: has_many: tickets, has_many: projects, :through => tickets

Would this be the correct associations for have a Project will have
multiple tickets, and each ticket will have exactly one milestone
reference?

The thing that has me confused is that each project can have multiple
milestone, ie: Milestone 1, Milestone 2, etc…but these milestones
will be related to the Project, so in the actual table there may be 5
instances of Milestone 1 but with a different project id.

I’m so lost, lol.

2

I would ditch the :through association here and have:

Milestone
belongs_to :project
has_many :tickets

Ticket
belongs_to :project
belongs_to :milestone

Project
has_many :milestones
has_many :tickets

This might seem like you’re doubling up, but this best represents the
real world model. A project has milestones and tickets can belong to
these milestones. Tickets may also exist outside of milestones.

With your initial model, you’d need to create tickets in order to
create milestones - which is not correct.

Hope that makes sense!

Steve

3

Steve,

That makes perfect sense, I’m new to this but something about the way
I was looking at it didn’t seem right, didn’t realize you could do
what you did, but it makes perfect sense!!!

Thanks for the quick reply!