I have 3 models, say A, B and C, and they are set up like this:
A:
has_many :Bs
has_many :Cs, through: B
B:
belongs_to A:
has_many :Cs
C:
belongs_to B:
In my model for C, I want to declare, that a column ccol within C must
be unique, but only within the scope of a certain A.
If the constraint would require uniqueness within a certain B, I could
write
validates :ccol, uniqueness: { scope: :B_id }
But since C doesn’t contain an A_id as foreign key, I can not express it
in this way.
Is there a possibility to achieve this?
Ronald
On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 6:07 AM, Ronald F. [email protected]
wrote:
I have 3 models, say A, B and C, and they are set up like this:
A:
has_many :Bs
has_many :Cs, through: B
In my model for C, I want to declare, that a column ccol within C must
be unique, but only within the scope of a certain A.
Is there a possibility to achieve this?
With a custom validation, you can theoretically do anything 
That said: consider that your expressed goal is a Law of Demeter
violation, and might be reason to rethink your models?
Hard to say more without understanding the actual domain…
FWIW,
Hassan S. ------------------------ [email protected]
twitter: @hassan
I think that the relationships in my model are OK so far. In my concrete
case, an instance of A would be a so-called (domain-specific) user
dictionaries. An instance of B would be a dictionary entry (each
dictionary has many entries). A C would be a so called idiom
description, i.e. explaining the associated B object in different ways.
Hence, each entry would contain several idioms.
The idiom description has among their columns are two fields which are
called “representation” and “kind”. In theory, the catenated key of
“representation” and “kind” must be unique within a dictionary
(different dictionaries may have the same [representation,kind] pair
though). For the discussion of this posting, I didn’t mention the
presence of the “kind” column, since it just complicates the fact, and
is not really important here for various reasons.
I could add to C a foreign key to A, and then express my validation with
the help of this key, but it seems to me pointless to introduce a new
column only for this purpose.
I am aware that I could do a custom validation, but I thought that the
case my case is commonplace, that Rails maybe has some built-in feature
for this which I just am not aware of.
Ronald