Finding all "documents" belonging to a "category" using "act

Rails
1

I have a “categories” table built using acts_as_tree and a “documents”
table that belongs to a specific category. Each category is a child of
a “root” category and I’d like to get all of the documents belonging
to the categories of a root category. Here’s what the structure looks
like:

Root 1
Category 1 # contains documents
Category 2 # contains documents
Root 2
Category 3 # contains documents
Category 4 # contains documents

categories_table:

using acts_as_tree

has_many :documents

id,
parent_id,
name

documents_table:

belongs_to :category

id,
category_id,
name

I know to get the documents for a specific category I can just do
category.documents. But I’d like to find all of the documents if I
visit ‘Root 1’ or ‘Root 2’ which means it’ll find the documents
belonging to the categories in Root 1 that belong to Root 1.

Can someone help?

2

use acts_as_nested_set
see /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.15.3/lib/active_record/
acts/nested_set.rb for more info

Dorren

============ category.rb ===================
class Category < ActiveRecord::Base
acts_as_nested_set

has_many :documents,
:foreign_key => “category_id”

validates_presence_of :name
end

======= migration: create_cateogries.rb ============
class CreateCategories < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.up
create_table :categories do |t|
t.column :name, :string
t.column :parent_id, :integer, :default => 0
t.column :lft, :integer, :default => 0
t.column :rgt, :integer, :default => 1
end
[:parent_id, :lft, :rgt].each{|x|
add_index :categories, x
}
end

def self.down
[:parent_id, :lft, :rgt].each{|x|
remove_index :categories, x
}
drop_table :categories
end
end