rails models for address books (company, person, a

Question

I want to create address-book-like set of models to represent company, person, location, etc. This looks like very typical address book, I wonder if somebody did it already with ruby on rails 3. The question appeared not (only) because of my laziness, but also because "best practice" approach is usually well-developed, have fewer pitfalls, etc. Currently I think about following models/fields:

Company:

• name
• has_many :persons
• has_many :locations

• has_many :urls, :through => :urlcatalog

  the reason to have URL catalog is a possibility to assign notes to URL

Person:

• name maybe split to first-middle-last
• phone
• has_one :location

• has_many :emails :through => :emailcatalog

  the reason to have email catalog is the same as above: one can assign "private", "office" labels to it. many phones can be organized this way as well.

Location

• address optional
• has_one :city

• has_one :country

  city or country should be present

City

• name
• has_one :country

Country

• name

any comments on this concept, thoughts, working examples, etc are welcome!

Answer 1

You should look up polymorphic associations. This means your location will be better organized and it will be easier to get parent etc...

Good example over at RailsWiki