A tale of two tables

[ricklach]

I am just starting out in ror and I need a bit of help with two tables. I have a person and residence table with a residence_id field in the person table. I have the has_many, belong_to methods in the appropriate person and residence methds. What I want to do is list all the fields from both the person and corresponding address tables. I can list all the person data but I can't seem to list the residence data. Can someone give me an example of how to do thad so that I can display data such as person.streetname and person.housenum in a list view. I know it has to be easy but I have exhausted all the examples I have without success.

Rick

[xmitchx]

Well lets say your belongs_to looks like this in your Person model:

belongs_to :residence

You access it like this:

my_person = Person.find(:first, :include => :residence)
my_person.residence.streetname
my_person.residence.housenum

That is the only way to access it by default. To access it like my_person.streetname you could always do this:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  ...

  def streetname
	self.residence.streetname
  end
end

And so on. In Rails 1.1, which should be out sometime soon, you can use delegations to make life easier, example:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :residence
  delegate :streetname, :to => 'residence'
  delegate :housenum, :to => 'residence'
 end

person = Person.find(:first, :include => :residence)
person.housenum # same thing as: person.residence.housenum
person.streetname # same thing as: person.residence.streetname

But don't forget, the above only works in RAILS 1.1, which is not out yet, but should be soon. But what I posted at the top of this post should hold you over.
I <3 Rails

[ricklach]

Thanks for that - I had the suspision that it had to be something simple. I amended your code to :

 my_person = Person.find(:all, :include => :residence)

and it worked fine except for the paging. In general, the scaffold produces the following code:

 @person_pages, @persons = paginate :persons, :order_by => 'lastname, firstname', :per_page => 10

. How do I split that statement so I have pagination and the snippet of code you sent me or can I do the whole works in one statement much like that produced by scaffold.

Rick