Attributes of a relationship

Rails
1

Hi all,

I have two types of models which I’m not sure how to model (or if it’s
even
feasible) with ActiveRecord. Let me know if you’ve got any good ideas.

  1. For those of you who are familliar with del.icio.us, you probably
    know
    that you can bookmark a site, and add your own tags to it. Each person
    has
    their own tags for a site, even though multiple people can bookmark a
    site.
    How would you create that relationship in ActiveRecord?
    user has many websites (easy)
    BUT… there’s no relation between tags and websites, or users and
    tags.
    It’s like a 3-way user-tag-website relationship. “Every user-website
    pair
    has many tags”. How do you model that one? Easy enough to do in a
    relational db, but I can’t get my head around it with Active Record.

  2. This one may be easier, but I still can’t get it… kinda similar to
    #1.
    Let’s say a user can bookmark a website, and can also “rank” that
    website.
    Unlike the example above, all I really want to do is assign an attribute
    to
    the user-website relationship (ie add a field to the users_websites
    table)
    “every user-website pair has one rank”. Again - is this one possible?

Many thanks for any advice you can give. I know these relationships are
somewhat complext, just wondering how far I can take ActiveRecord before
dropping into straight SQL.

Thanks!
Tom

http://lianza.org/

2

User:
has_many :bookmarks

Bookmarks:
belongs_to :user
belongs_to :site
has_and_belongs_to_many :tags

Site:
has_many :bookmarks

Tags:
has_and_belongs_to_many :bookmarks

You would need the following tables:
users
bookmarks << (has a user_id and site_id foreign key)(this could also
have a rank field)
sites
tags
bookmarks_tags << (bookmark_id and tag_id foreign key)

In rails you will then be able to do the following:
@user = User.find(:first)
@user.bookmarks (returns list of bookmarks for this user)

@bookmark = Bookmark.find(:first)
@bookmark.tags (returns a list of tags)

@tag = Tag.find(:first)
@tag.bookmarks (returns list of bookmarks for this tag)

@site = Site.find(:first)
@site.bookmarks (returns list of bookmarks for this site)

I hope this helps,
Joey (joey__)