CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyactiverecord
Nick Z
Nick Z

Reputation: 63

Referencing An Arbitrary Resource from an ActiveRecord model

I'm building a fairly complex web application in Rails and have come across an issue that I suspect some have encountered before but for which I cannot find a generally agreed upon solution. The issue concerns referencing resources of arbitrary types (and with arbitrary corresponding tables) from a single model property/table column. My use case is a simple news feed, where feed items have the form:

id (int)
tag (string)
message (string)
expiry (date)
resource_id (string)

"resource_id" is a reference to the resource that is centrally concerned by the feed item. In my project, I presently have it taking the form "class_name:id". When fetching news feed items, I construct a set of strings of this form corresponding to resources owned by the user and run an "in" type query on the resource_id column. It's relevant to note that the structure of the app is such that users will only own a small (< 10) number of these resources so the efficiency of lookup isn't a problem with this structure. It just feels like a hacky and very wrong solution and I suspect there's a more correct way to do what I'm trying to do.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 96

Answers (1)

DGM
DGM

Reputation: 26979

I'd use two columns: resource_type and resource_id. Makes the joins more normalized.

Upvotes: 1

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