Implementing the composite pattern in Ruby on Rails

Question

I'm trying to implement the typical gof composite pattern:

example class diagram

I'm kind of lost when it comes to querying it later on. For example would there be a nice way to query all Composites without any ancestors?

My initial idea was to create something like that with ActiveRecord

class Component < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :childrenable, :polymorphic => true
  has_and_belongs_to_many: composites
end

class Leaf < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many: components, :as => :childrenable
end

class Composite < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many: components, :as => :childrenable
  has_and_belongs_to_many :components
end  

Would that work? How would I build a list like that (in the View later on f.ex.)?:

CompositeA  
  ->Item
  ->CompositeB
    ->ItemA
  ->CompositeC
    ->ItemA
    ->ItemB  

I'm just a bit lost when it comes to the query. Are there any best practices for this problem?

Answer 1

There are couple of aspects before the actual solution:

• The diagram and your example differ in a very critical aspect. The Diagram suggests that relationship between Container and Children is one-many. However your example shows it to be many-to-many.
• It can be solved in both the cases using primarily a single Model.

Many-to-many

It can be solved using a many-to-many relationship with itself.

Model

class Component < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Add as many attributes you need
  attr_accessible :name

  has_and_belongs_to_many :children,
    :class_name => "Component",
    :join_table => "children_containers",
    :foreign_key => "container_id",
    :association_foreign_key => "child_id"

  has_and_belongs_to_many :containers,
    :class_name => "Component",
    :join_table => "children_containers",
    :foreign_key => "child_id",
    :association_foreign_key => "container_id"

  # All Components that do not belong to any container
  scope :roots, -> {where("not exists (select * from children_containers where child_id=components.id)")}

  # All Components that have no children
  scope :leaves, -> {where("not exists (select * from children_containers where container_id=components.id)")}

  # Is this Component at root level
  def root?
    self.containers.empty?
  end

  # Is this Component at leaf level
  def leaf?
    self.children.empty?
  end

  # Notice the recursive call to traverse the Component hierarchy
  #   Similarly, it can be written to output using nested <ul> and <li>s as well.
  def to_s(level=0)
    "#{'  ' * level}#{name}\n" + children.map {|c| c.to_s(level + 1)}.join
  end
end

Migration

class CreateComponents < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :components do |t|
      t.string :name

      t.timestamps
    end

    create_table :children_containers, :id => false do |t|
        t.references :child
        t.references :container
    end

    add_index :children_containers, :child_id
    add_index :children_containers, [:container_id, :child_id], :unique => true
  end
end

Sample code

["R1", "R2", "L1", "L2", "C1", "C2", "C3"].each {|n| Component.create(:name => n)}

[
    ["R1", "C1"],
    ["R2", "C2"],
    ["R1", "C3"],
    ["R2", "C3"],
    ["C1", "L1"],
    ["C2", "L2"],
    ["C3", "L1"],
    ["C3", "L2"]
].each {|pair| p,c=pair; Component.find_by_name(p).children << Component.find_by_name(c)}

puts Component.roots.map(&:name).to_s
# ["R1", "R2"]

puts Component.leaves.map(&:name).to_s
# ["L1", "L2"]

puts Component.find_by_name("R1").to_s
# R1
#   C1
#     L1
#   C3
#     L1
#     L2

One-to-many

It is much simpler in this case. Use Ancestry (https://github.com/stefankroes/ancestry) in Component model. It will provide all the operations that are needed. Alternatively acts_as_tree can be used instead of Ancestry.

Let me know if you need sample code for this.