用于组织NFL的最佳Ruby数据结构

Question

I'm trying to organize NFL teams into data structures in Ruby. My goal is to easily query to know that the Baltimore Ravens are the AFC (conference) and the AFC North (division).

I would also like to easily see which teams are in the AFC (16 of them) and which teams are in the AFC North (4 of them).

Right now I'm using arrays on arrays but I'm sure there is a better way to do this.

With the way my data is structured right now, I have to puts nfl[0][0][0] to print out Baltimore Ravens (first 0 is AFC/NFC, second 0 is conference and third 0 is division). This seems to be way too complicated.

Any help or insight would be amazing!

Answer 1

They should be classes with relationships rather than trying to leverage the native ruby data structures. Even if the classes don't DO things, you get a lot of natural sounding code out of rails relationships.

I'd much rather say:

team = Team.find_by_name("Ravens")

than

team = nfl[0][0][0]

You also get potentially other helpful calls for nearly free:

team = Team.find_by_city("Baltimore")   # also gets you the ravens

and when you want to grab all the teams for a division:

all_nfc_teams = Division.find_by_name("NFC").teams

which is far more readable than

all_nfc_teams = nfl[0][1]

I can imagine all sorts of other helpful semantics, like finding all of the week 4 games for the AFC, or ordering a division of teams by wins and losses. You can define scopes on Teams that would allow you to retrieve collections of teams with very clear semantics.

all_nfc_teams = Team.nfc

Answer 2

"Best" is subjective. It also depends on the nature of the organizational entities.

Do divisions and/or conferences do anything other than hold teams? If so, then they should be classes.

Otherwise hashes are probably fine, although I might encapsulate them in a convenience class, to hide the hash structures, provide named-team access, etc.