One controller with multiple models? Am I doing this correctly?

Question

My web app, up until this point, has been fairly straight forward. I have Users, Contacts, Appointments and a few other things to manage. All of these are easy - it's just one model per section so I just did a scaffold for each, then modified the scaffolded code to fit my need. Pretty easy...

Unfortunately I am having a problem on this next section because I want the 'Financials' section of my app to be more in depth than the other sections which I simply scaffolded. For example, when the user clicks the 'Contacts' link on the navigation bar, it just shows a list of contacts, pretty straight forward and is in line with the scaffold. However, when the user clicks the 'Financials' link on the navigation bar, I want to show the bank accounts on the left of the page and a few of the transactions on the right.

So the financials tab will basically work with data from two models: transactions and bank_accounts. I think I should make the models (transactions & bank_accounts) and then make a controller called Financials, then I can query the models from the Financials controller and display the pages in app/views/financials/

Am I correct in this app layout? I have never worked with more than the basics of scaffolding so I want to ensure I get this right!

Thank you!

Answer 1

If you are comfortable with scaffolding then i would suggest that you generate a scaffold for both

transactions: script/generate scaffold transaction financial_id:integer ...

bank_accounts: script/generate scaffold bank_account financial_id:integer ...

and financials script/generate scaffold financials ...

In your transactions model, add this:

class Transaction < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :financial
end

In your bank_account model, add this:

class Bank_account < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :financial
end

In your financial model, add this:

class Financial < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :transactions
  has_many :bank_accounts
end

Now from your financials controller you can use something like this:

def index
  @financial = Financial.find(params[:id])

  #This fetches all bank_accounts related to financial
  @bank_accounts = @financial.bank_accounts

  #This fetches all transactions related to financial
  @transactions = @financial.transactions
end

In your views you can view all the bank accounts belonging to a particular financial by just doing this:

<% @bank_accounts.each do |bank_account| -%>
   <%=h bank_account.something_here %> <!-- something_here is the column name corresponding to your bank_account table.  -->
   <%=h bank_account.something_here %> <!-- something_here is the column name corresponding to your bank_account table.  -->
   <%=h bank_account.something_here %> <!-- something_here is the column name corresponding to your bank_account table.  -->
   .
   .
   .
<% end -%>

In your views you can view all the transactions belonging to a particular financial by adding something similar:

<% @transactions.each do |transaction| -%>
   <%=h transaction.something_here %> <!-- something_here is the column name corresponding to your bank_account table.  -->
   <%=h transaction.something_here %> <!-- something_here is the column name corresponding to your bank_account table.  -->
   <%=h transaction.something_here %> <!-- something_here is the column name corresponding to your bank_account table.  -->
   .
   .
   .
<% end -%>

Remember, while creating a new transaction/bankaccount use the id belonging to the particular financial. Hope this helps. Cheers! :)