Get two associations within a Factory to share another association

Question

I\'ve got these 5 models: Guardian, Student, Relationship, RelationshipType and School. Between them, I\'ve got these associations

class Guardian < ActiveReco         


        

Answer 1

This isn't really an answer you are seeking, but it seems that the difficulty in creating this association is suggesting that the table design may need to be adjusted.

Asking the question What if the user changes school?, the school on both the Student and Guardian needs to be updated, otherwise, the models get out of sync.

I put forward that a student, a guardian, and a school, all have a relationship together. If a student changes school, a new Relationship is created for the new school. As a nice side effect this enables a history to exist of where the student has been schooled.

The belongs_to associations would be removed from Student and Guardian, and moved to Relationship instead.

The factory can then be changed to look like this:

factory :relationship do
  school
  student
  guardian
  relationship_type
end

This can then be used in the following ways:

# use the default relationship which creates the default associations
relationship = Factory.create :relationship
school = relationship.school
student = relationship.student
guardian = relationship.guardian

# create a relationship with a guardian that has two charges at the same school
school = Factory.create :school, name: 'Custom school'
guardian = Factory.create :guardian
relation1 = Factory.create :relationship, school: school, guardian: guardian
relation2 = Factory.create :relationship, school: school, guardian: guardian
student1 = relation1.student
student2 = relation2.student