Newbie doubts on Rails

Question

So my program has 2 models, Cars and Payments, where Payments is belong_to Cars and is a one-to-many relationship.

I want to create a feature for calculating the accounts by going through the Payments' value and within a specific period. The user will give 2 inputs, start_date and end_date, then the program will calculate the total profit and expenses with the payments made within the period stated.

My question is, for the account part, should I create a Account Controller or creating new routes in the existing payment_controller to calculate for the accounts part. If creating an Account Controller, how do I access the payments model from the Account Controller?

refer to this link for my project.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10960981/VKVINAUTO.rar

Or you could suggest a better method for me to proceed.

Answer 1

GIT

Firstly, you need to consider the use of git or another Software Configuration Management system - which will give you the ability to properly manage the various elements of your code & its respective versioning.

Specifically, you shouldn't be posting RAR file with your code. You'll be much better suited to using the likes of GitHub or BitBucket to store & share the relevant snippets of code you need help with.

You'll be best suited looking up about git with this Railscast:

---

Fix

To answer your question about your fix, here's what you have to consider:

#config/routes.rb
root: "payments#index"
resources :cars do
  resources :payments
end

#app/models/car.rb
class Car < ActiveRecord::Base
   has_many :payments do
       def dates begin, end
           where("created_at >= begin AND created_at <= end")
       end
   end
end

#app/models/payment.rb
class Payment < ActiveRecord::Base
   belongs_to :car
end

#app/controllers/cars_controller.rb
class PaymentsController < ApplicationController
   def index
      @car = Car.find params[:car_id]
      @payments = @car.payments
      if params[:begin].present? && params[:end].present?
          @payments = @car.payments.dates(params[:begin], params[:end])
      end
   end
end

This will give you the ability to use the following:

#app/views/payments/index.html.erb
<%= form_tag car_payments_index(@car), method: :get do %>
    <%= text_field_tag :begin %>
    <%= text_field_tag :end %>
    <%= submit_tag "Go">
<% end %>

This will essentially "refresh" the payments index page, determining the dates as you require.

---

Models

If you want to access the Payment model from the accounts_controller, you'll just be able to reference it by invoking it:

#app/controllers/accounts_controller.rb
class AccountsController < ApplicationController
   def index
      @payments = Payment.all
   end
end

You'll want to read up on the MVC programming pattern, which Rails is built on. This will show you the relationship between Models, views and Controller -- specifically, with them being interchangeable / exclusive