Complex has-many-through relationships and models

Rails
1

I have some questions about Has Many Through and how to manage a
couple of things that keep cropping up. I’m reasonably new to rails,
having come from a C# background and I have to admit I’m having some
trouble getting my head around models. Anyway this is my second
project in rails and it’s a little more complex than the first. I’m
trying to do things the ‘rails way’ but I’m running into a few
problems.

So, let me start off with some background. We have a few tables that
enjoy various has-many (and has-many-thorugh) relationships.
To start off with we have an ‘owners’ table (these are essentially
users but we call them owners for various reasons)

Owners have the usual stuff, username, password, first_name,
last_name, etc.

We also have ‘notebooks’. These notebooks have little information,
just a name and are used to hold notes (duh!), but more on that later.

Owners have many notebooks through a table called
‘notebookshares’ (man I hate that name). Notebookshares carry
information about the owners relationship to the notebook,
so on top of notebook_id and owner_id the notebookshares table
contains a field called ‘access’. This field can be one of three
values; ‘readonly’, ‘full’, ‘owner’. If it’s ‘owner’ then that user
created the notebook and owns it and everything in it. They can then
share notebooks they own with others, which is where ‘readonly’ and
‘full’ come in. If I have ‘readonly’ access to a notebook then I’d
somewhat restricted on what I can do, if I have ‘full’ access then I
can do everything to the notebook but share it with others.
Finally notebooks have many notes, but notes only belong to one
notebook. Notes simply contain some text, the date/time they were
created and last updated.

Essentially it all looks like this:

class Owner < ActiveRecord::Base

has_many :notebookshares, :dependent => true
has_many :notebooks, :through => :notebookshares do
def find_editable()
find(:all, :conditions => “notebookshares.access <>
‘readonly’”)
end

def by_share_type(share_type)
  find(:all, :conditions => ['notebookshares.access = ?',

share_type])
end
end

etc…

end

class Notebookshare < ActiveRecord::Base

belongs_to :owner
belongs_to :notebook

end

class Notebook < ActiveRecord::Base

has_many :notes, :order => ‘position’, :dependent => :destroy

has_many :notebookshares, :dependent => true
has_many :owners, :through => :notebookshares do
def find_editable()
find(:all, :conditions => “notebookshares.access <>
‘readonly’”)
end

def by_share_type(share_type)
  find(:all, :conditions => ['notebookshares.access = ?',

share_type])
end
end

etc…

end

class Note < ActiveRecord::Base

belongs_to :notebook

acts_as_list :scope => :notebook

etc…

end

So, if I have either ‘owner’ or ‘full’ access to a notebook (as
defined by the relationship between my owner_id and the specific
notebook_id) then I can edit any given note in that notebook. If I
only have ‘readonly’ I can view the notes but can’t really manipulate
them in any way.

One of the things that keeps coming up is the ‘access’ level of a
particular note or notebook. For example, if I’m trying to delete a
note I need to know if I have the right to do so.
For example something like this would be great (which would be found
in the notes controller):

def destroy

@owner = Owner.find(session[:owner_id])

@note = @owner.notes.find(params[:id])

@note.destroy unless @note.access == 'readonly'

end

Similarly this information would be fantastic for notebooks, so
something like

#where @owner is an Owner object that was retrieved previously
if @owner.notebooks.find(params[:id]).access == ‘readonly’

blah...blah...blah

end

Now, I think it would have to be owner driven since the access an
owner has on a notebook is what defines what they can do to the
notebook and subsequently to the notes in that notebook.
I suspect that we could also have something like

Notebook.find(params[:id]).access(@owner) since we would then know the
owner.id and the notebook.id but I kind of like the first way better.

So, I have a few questions:

  1. I know it’s possible to do something like
    @owner.notebook.notes.find(params[:id]) but is it possible to do
    something like @owner.notes.find(params[:id]) ?
    If it is I certainly haven’t been able to work out how - perhaps
    I’m missing something.

  2. If it is possible to do 1 (or even if it isn’t and you have to do
    the longer and less elegant @owner.notebook.notes.find(params[:id]))
    is it possible to add a function to the note model that would return
    the access for that given note, or even add an accessor that get
    populated after the note is retrieved.

I suspect that the difficulty would be in determining if the owner was
present, because it would also be possible to do something like
Notes.find(params[:id]) which means that we wouldn’t know who was
looking for the note and therefore what kind of access level they had.
Perhaps in this case the access function would return nil.

  1. Similarly for 2 above how would you go about writing a function for
    Notebook that returned the access level for the supplied owner using
    something like

Notebook.find(params[:id]).access(@owner)

and similarly could something like

@owner.notebooks.find(:all)

prepopulate an access accessor for the notebook such that we could do
something like

foreach @owner.notebook.find(:all) do |notebook|

 puts notebook.name unless notebook.access == 'readonly'

end

Thanks for any help on this subject - even a link to something similar
would be appreciated.

2

Actually on further examination we can’t even do something like

@owner.notebooks.notes.find(params[:id])

is this right? Seems odd to me.

3

So, there’s a lot of questions here… I’ll actually address the last
one
first, because it’s kind of easy:

When you do @owner.notebooks, it returns a collection of Notebook
objects.
So, when you do @owner.notebooks.notes.find(:all) or whatever, you’re
actually trying to call the notes function on the collection, as opposed
to
the underlying objects themselves. You’ll either have to iterate over
them,
or do something like
class Owner < ActiveRecord::Base
def notes
self.notebooks.collect(&:notes)
end
end

Then, @owner.notes will return all the notes for all notebooks.

Now, on to some of the other stuff:

For #1 in your first email, this (I think) does exactly what you want.
For #2 in your first email, I going to make an assumption: I believe
from
what I read that notes don’t have individual access, they only have
access
based on the owners access to the notebook they are in.
class Note < ActiveRecord::Base
def has_access?(owner)
self.notebook.has_access?(owner)
end
end
class Notebook < ActiveRecord::Base
def has_access?(owner)
return nil if owner.nil?
begin
return Notebookshare.find_by_owner_id_and_notebook_id(owner.id,
self.id).access != ‘read-only’
rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
return nil
end
end
end

Tell me if I’ve answered all your questions, I’m too lazy to read
through
the whole thing again and look :stuck_out_tongue:

4

Luke,

Thanks for the response. Super helpful, but I have some more questions
(isn’t that always the way)

would

class Owner < ActiveRecord::Base
def notes
self.notebooks.collect(&:notes)
end
end

only return notes for the notebooks that the owner has access to (I
suspect that it would). I’m unfamiliar with the terminology of
&:notes, although I get the idea of running collect on each elelment
of the noebooks array.

The other 2 functions that you provided (has_access? for both notes
and notebooks) would certainly work but I was also wondering if there
was some way of prepopulating an accessor when something like

@owner.notebooks.find(:all)

was run, so that rather than having to call has_access on each
notebook you could just call it’s ‘access’ accessor

perhaps something like:

class Notebook < ActiveRecord::Base

after_filter :set_access

attr_accessor :access

has_many :notes, :order => ‘position’, :dependent => :destroy

has_many :notebookshares, :dependent => true
has_many :owners, :through => :notebookshares do
def find_editable()
find(:all, :conditions => “notebookshares.access <>
‘readonly’”)
end

def by_share_type(share_type)
  find(:all, :conditions => ['notebookshares.access = ?',

share_type])
end
end

def set_access

self.access = <this is where I get stuck>

end

etc…

end

where I get stuck is in set_access. Is there a way to determine if the
notebook has been retrieved using something like:

@owner.notebooks.find(:all)

and hence use the calling @owner object to determine the access. I
realize that Notebook.find(1) would have to return nil in access
because we wouldn’t know which owner we’re looking at the access for
and then the has_access? function would come into play.

Hope this isn’t too confusing.
Once again, thanks for the help.

Dale

5

of the noebooks array.
What I wrote is exactly the same as self.notebooks.collect { |notebook|
notebook.notes }… basically, takes each notebook in turn and queries
for
their notes… this would only work for notebooks that have been
cross-referenced through notebookshares, whatever kind of access that
is
denoting (read-only, whatever). If you want to specify a certain type
of
access, you can do
self.notebooks.collect {|notebook| notebook.notes if
notebook.has_access?
(self)}

More later… gotta run.