Setting up proper relationships

Rails
1

Hi

I am trying to make a small survey app and started to get a little
confused. So far i have

survey.rb
has_many :answers

answer.rb
belongs_to :survey

So Survey will have many answers, and answer will belong to only one
survey. This part works fine. Now i want to record survey results (you
can only pick ONE answer, it will NOT be a multiple answer survey).

To do this, as far as i know i should create anwsers_surveys table and
setup proper habtm relations or create a new model and go with :through.

Is this the way to go?, since i am not really trying to make a real
habtm between surveys and answers but need to record the results.

2

why not just have a score column in the answers table?

3

Pawel Jur wrote:

Is this the way to go?, since i am not really trying to make a real
habtm between surveys and answers but need to record the results.

Pawel,

Step back from ActiveRecord for a bit and examine your problem domain.
If a survey can have multiple answers and and answer can have multiple
surveys then you have already answered your own question! i.e. you
will need a link table either with the habtm (deprecated) or the first
class model approach (:through)

I write this response with the assumption that “answer” is equivalent to
“result”. If I am mistaken then please forgive the confusion.

HTH ilan

4

Thanks for responses!

Chris H. wrote:

why not just have a score column in the answers table?

Yup. So simple solution and it fits just right for my problem. I gotta
start drawing my models and relations on paper before i start making
decisions i guess.

Ilan,

You are right if a survey could have multiple anwsers and answer can
have multiple surveys but that’s not the case. Chris solution fits.