Rails 3 Routes and model setup

Question

Just looking to know what the best practice is to do the following.

I have two models

Group
  id    int pk
  name  string

Company
  id   int pk
  name string

A group instance can have zero or many instances of companies

A company instance can have zero or many instances of groups

Validate that a company cannot belong to the same group more than once

use a has_and_belongs_to_many association (No intervening model) ?

use a has_many :through (setup an organisation model) ?

I want to setup restful views to:

Group
/groups     (Show All Group Names)
/groups/1   (Show one group)
/groups/new (Add Group)
etc...


Companies
/companies/1 (show all companies)
/companies/1 (Show company)
/companies/new (Add Company)
etc...

The issue i am trying to get around is how do I setup the following views with the models ?

(Show all companies for a specified group) /groups/1/companies ??
(Add, update and remove companies for a specified group ?!)

Answer 1

You want to use nested routes

e.g. write in your routes.rb file

  resources :groups do 
    resources :companies
  end

then in your model a company belongs_to a group and a group has_many companies.

make sure to check out the guides for more information on routing.