DB Best Practices: Contacts

Rails
1

While not 100% Rails related I had a quick question while designing my
app…

Whats the best practice for contacts and addresses. I would assume a
company has many addresses and contacts? How do some of you deal with
this?

In my case, I have many companies, each with different addresses (ship
to and bill to) as well as different contacts at these addresses.

2

Hi !

2007/1/8, Shai S. [email protected]:

While not 100% Rails related I had a quick question while designing my
app…

Whats the best practice for contacts and addresses. I would assume a
company has many addresses and contacts? How do some of you deal with
this?

In my case, I have many companies, each with different addresses (ship
to and bill to) as well as different contacts at these addresses.

Address should be a full-fledged model, with a polymorphic association
to Company and/or Contact and/or Invoice. If you want to reuse
addresses, you’ll need a join model between contacts et. al and
Address.

As you said, this is really data modelling, and not Rails. But great
discussion should ensue anyway !

Bye !

François Beausoleil
http://blog.teksol.info/
http://piston.rubyforge.org/

3

Maybe you shouldn’t be looking for best practice. It’s going to cost
you big.
You could, for example, stick to the sample data you have and put the 2
addresses directly in the company table. And then relate the contacts
to this table.
The problem here is if you get another branch of the same company.
You’ll have to rename both branch in “Megacorp Shanghai” and “Megacorp
NY” both entries being unrelated in your data model, and both
containing a billing address that may be the same…
It’s up to you, but take everything in consideration and go for the
simplest your-industry-specific time-and-money-saving-model you can.

Think about the way you are going to import and enter your existing
data, too. It can be a real nightmare if you play it too “100%”.

4

Hi,

don’t have experience regarding this with Rails, but based on
experience with Siebel (a CRM package) you could go with something
like this (I don’t have much experience with Rails yet, so bear with
me):

You would have your three tables:
companies { |t|
t.column :bill_to_id
t.column :ship_to_id

more columns

}
contacts { |t|
t.column :company_id
t.column :business_addr_id

more columns

}
addresses { |t|
t.column :company_id

more columns

}

Each address would belong to a company and you wouldn’t want to delete
addresses (maybe just a deleted flag or a status field). So a company
could have maybe just one, maybe two, maybe 16 addresses (old
addresses, different office locations, …)
Only one of those addresses would be your bill to address and only one
would be the ship to address (in Siebel these are called something
like “Primary Ship To Address” and “Primary Bill To Address”). To
select them you could pick one of the company’s addresses from a drop
down list. You could select the same address for both resulting in
company.bill_to_id == company.ship_to_id or it could be different
addresses.
There would be joins company.bill_to_id -> address.id and
company.ship_to_id -> address.id and a 1:many relationship from
company.id -> address.company_id

Now, each contact would be associated with a company. When you select
the contacts address, you again pick one of the company’s addresses
from a drop down list. (You might even have the HQ address in
company.addr_id and use that as a default for the contact)
There would be a join from contact.business_addr_id -> address.id

Orders could be handled similarly. They would belong to a company and
the default bill to and ship to addresses would be the primary ones of
the company (company.bill_to_id and company.ship_to_id). But you could
change those and pick another address from a drop down list of company
addresses and populate order.bill_to_id and order.ship_to_id
accordingly.

Let me know if you’ve got questions about this.

Thomas