##Keeping Track of a Attribute for a Period of Time Each Year
I’m trying to make a Rails 4 app for a scholarship organization, but having a hard time with a few things involving the volunteer hours needed by the scholarship recipients years.
There are two types of scholars: undergraduate scholars and graduate scholars.
Things I see as model candiates I’ve put in bold, while things I see as attributes are italicized
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Each scholar (what I’m calling my user model for this example) has many volunteer hours each scholar_year
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Each scholar year has a beginning date, ending date, mandatory hours for undergraduate scholars, and mandatory hours for graduate-level scholars.
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The scholar who completes their volunteer hours the fastest needs to be tracked (the prize/thing isn’t necessary to be recorded on the table, but I sort of want to know how to do this as well)
I’m trying to conceptualize doing the following but having a hard time planning out keeping track of the progress the two types of scholars will have towards completing their volunteer hours given the fact they can get hours for volunteering specific events or attending specific events, but I’ll temporarily abstract that for a moment. ;
##How I’ve attempted to Solve the Problem
Based on this information, I figured I’ll have to use a has_many :through relationship, with a table called scholar_year_assignments. Considering I have to track what volunteerable ‘thing’ and what year each scholar has completed it in order use the Ruby on Rails :calculate API
###scholar_year_assignments table
|id(int)| scholar_id (int)| scholar_year_id (int) | completed_volunteer_hours (decimal) | successfully_completed_hours_on (datetime)
With table in mine, I did the following
###Simpliified Scholar & Scholar_year Tables (Rails 4)
#NOTE: More than likely abstracting scholars out to two, UndergraduateScholarProfile, GraduateScholarProfile due to the many types of users I have to deal with and they don't exactly have the same data that'll lead to a LOT of `nil` tables.
class Scholar < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :scholar_years, through: :scholar_year_assignments, dependent: :destroy
has_one :volunteer_history
#belongs to :scholarable, polymorphic: true may be needed here when abstracted
#My attempt of implementing eligibility without considering scholar type
def eligible_this_year(year = Time.now.year -1)
if ScholarYear.where(year: year).nil? || ScholarYear.where(year: year).hours > volunteer_hours
false
else
true
end
def volunteer_hours
#Have no clue or now braindead: Doing something like VolunteerHistory.where(user_id: self).calculate(:sum, 'volunteer_hours') or something similar to the association table seems very wrong.
end
end
class VolunteerHistory < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :Scholar
belongs_to :Scholar_year
belongs_to :volunteerable, polymorphic: true #I'm guessing this is correct, probably wrong
end
class ScholarYear < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :scholars, through: :scholar_year_assignments, dependent: :destroy
end
# I want to able to the following assuming the scholar is scoped from user
@scholar.elgibile_this_year #true or false if the scholar met the volunteer hours this past year
##What I’m confused about with my attempt of understanding this scenario.
I’m confused on how I’m going to populate the completed_id hours part if I’m correct on approaching this problem with a volunteer history record. I’m assuming a before_save or other before_action filters, but unsure on which ones to utilize t.
In addition, I’m having hard time figuring out whether it makes sense to think about using :delegate methods to help me simplify solving this scenario.