The past few days have been pretty frustrating with ConfsList. Mainly because I wasn’t making any real progress. I had been stuck on defining relationships these past few days until yesterday.
In ConfsList, I’ve got a model for events and with each event, there is a location that goes with it. In ConfsList, location is also another model. For the past three days, I had been defining the relationship so that each event has a location.
Initially I tried having the event model to have a single location using Rails’ has_one and on the location side saying that each location belongs_to an event.
On the view, I wanted for the user to assign a location to the event when it was being created. This would be done by passing a location_id to the event model. But for some reason this didn’t work for me.
So upon looking over the ActiveRecord docs again, I tried redefining the relationship as a has_many on both sides through a join table. Setting this up wasn’t too bad, but again when trying to pass the location_id with the new event form, Rails would complain about the parameter not being allowed.
I had fixated on trying to get the application to work with this relationship by trying to tweak the parameters and the models. But to no end, I couldn’t figure it out. During this time I got frustrated and was super tempted to switch back to Node. Since I wouldn’t have to work about using ActiveRecord and just define the model and relationships by hand.
But I was determined to make it work. It wasn’t until I started to think about how I would solve it in Node. That I would assign a column on the event model with location_id and have the event reference location objects. It was then it clicked to me that I might have the relationship defined incorrectly.
Upon reading about ActiveRecord relationships, I realized that in order to get the event model to have a column of location_id in its table. I had to have the event belong_to and the location has_many defined in the model. Once I had switched this and created a migration for my database, it worked the way I had expected it.
Where there would be a limited set of locations, but each location could potentially have multiple events. It’s instances like this where relational databases confuse me. But I do feel like I have a better understanding of ActiveRecord because I had been struggling with it for 3 full days.
