Rails - Prevent post request creating multiple rows from an array whilst still keeping the data

Question

I'll start with my controllers create action:

def create
    this_order = params[:line_items]
    this_order.each do |this|
        @order = Transaction.new
        @order.shopifyid = params[:id]
        @order.vartitle = this['variant_title']
        @order.save
    end
end

If you're unfamiliar with the ShopifyAPI, this is just looking through an order JSON and creating an internal row of each order in my transactions table, at the moment it just stores the order id and then goes into a line_items array and gets the variant title to store with it.

It works fine, but of course this creates a new row for each item in an order, when i actually want it to give me one order with all the items in it.

Is this a case of converting my table columns into an array of hashes? Or am i missing another way to do this?

Answer 1

You can create two Models Transaction and Item with the following relations:

Transaction

has_many :items

Item

belongs_to :transaction

Your controller action:

def create
    @order = Transaction.new
    @order.shopifyid = params[:id]
    this_order = params[:line_items]
    this_order.each do |this|
        @order.items.new( #Item attributes )
    end
    @order.save
end

I think in this way you can have variant_title in the item table.

Answer 2

I am not very familiar with shopyify but it seems like your issue is just related to the fact that you are creating a new object per line item as a result of where you are placing you Transaction.new call. Another way to organize this is just to have another table for line items. You could store this hash of line items in the database but chances are you are going to want to do some sort of queries based off of the line items and to go through the process of serializing this column for every transaction is not a time efficient solution. Goku's solution is along the lines of what I am referring to