CouchDB accessing composed column

[Paulo Carvalho]

Hello

In my RoR application, I am using Couchrest_model to access a CouchDB database.

I have a model which represents an scientific Article.
I am going to simplify my model to explain it better. An article can have a title, a year and one or more authors.

In the couchDB database, an article can be represented like this:

article {
  title = "abc",
  year = "2012",
  author = {
     name = Paulo,
     age = 34
  }
}

(In the case the article only have an author)

OR

article {
  title = "abc",
  year = "2012",
  author = {
    [0] {
       name = "Paulo",
       age = "34"
    }
    [1] {
       name = "Philippe",
       age = "32"
    }
  }
}

class Article < CouchRest::Model::Base
  property :title
  property :year
  property :author
end

In the case my article have only one author, I can access author's information (name and age) like this:
Article.author.name
Article.author.age

But, how can I access the information of authors if the article have more than 1 author?

[Marc Peabody]

I'm not terribly familiar with CouchRest but here's my guess from a quick glance.

I think you need to define your author as another type and reference it accordingly:
class Author < CouchRest::Model::Base property :age, Integer property :name, String end class Article < CouchRest::Model::Base property :title, String property :year, String property :author, :cast_as => ["Author"] end

This might mean that you have to always make your Couch records get saved in the more complicated array format that you used, even when there's only one author. I suppose you could try it both ways and see if it works.

[Paulo Carvalho]

Hello,

Thanks for your answer. After trying and trying, I figure that the object returned was an array of objects.
So depending on the scenario, I test if the returned object is an instance of array or something else and then I execute the proper action.

Best regards.