Nesting Awards in Students
The connections between students and awards are workable, but the way that
the two models are handled by the web application doesnât reflect their
actual roles in the data models. Depending on your application and your
preferences, this may be perfectly acceptable. There is, however, a
better way to represent the awards
model that more clearly reflects its relationship to students,
implemented in ch09/students002.
The models will stay the same, and the views will stay almost the same. The main things that will change are the routing and the controller logic. Chapter 13 will explain routing in much greater depth, but for now itâs worth exploring the ways that routing can reflect the relationships of your data models.
Note
If the work involved in creating a nested resource seems
overwhelming, donât worry. Itâs not mandatory Rails practice, though
it is certainly a best practice. Unfortunately, itâs just complicated
enough that itâs hard to automateâbut maybe someday this will all
disappear into a friendlier script/generate
command.
Changing the Routing
Near the top of the config/routes.rb file are the lines:
map.resources :awards map.resources :students
Delete them, and replace them with:
map.resources :students, :has_many => [ :awards ]
Itâs another has_many
relationship, which is this time expressed as a parameter to map.resources
. You donât need to specify the
belongs_to
relationship. Yes, this is kind of a violation of âDonât Repeat Yourself,â ...
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