[Rails] Auction associations and methods

What does an Auction object represent? It may help to tell us some of
the attributes of Auction to give us a better understanding. Having
answered that the question is how many bids are associated with an
auction? If the answer is many then it you must use auction has many
bids, otherwise it would only be able to be associated with one bid.
Is the current price the highest of the prices in the bids? In which
case you should probably not store the current price at all, but work
it out when needed from the associated bids. Only have it stored
separately if it becomes a performance issue as it will likely
complicate the code significantly.

Colin

Well the auction object needs to be the auction itself, where users join and bid... If my reasoning is flawed I would love some ideas.

As for the bidding, I was thinking that instead of there being a highest bidder, I would simply have a button that the users could click that would increase the price by one dollar every time. Is there a way I could do this?
Clay

Are you just thinking of keeping track of the current price and which
user it is then? I think there may be a problem with that, I think
you will need to track the history of all bids in case there is a
dispute from a user. Without the full history you would not be able
to demonstrate the sequence of +1s

Also what would happen if 500 users all clicked the +$1 within a
second of each other? The last one could end up having made a bid
$499 more than he anticipated.

Colin

Exactly. These are some problems I haven't figured out how to solve! This is my first web application. I have thought about all users clicking at the same time... What would be a good way to keep track of the users, have a record of the bidding, and increment the price the same amount every time? Would it be a method in the model or controller or what?

Please quote the previous message when replying and insert your
comments at appropriate points, it makes it easier to follow the
thread. Otherwise someone seeing your previous message will have no
idea what you are saying 'exactly' to. Thanks.

Don't worry about where methods go yet, get the models and
associations sorted. It seems to me you are going to have to have
auctions, users, bids with appropriate associations. The +1 button
should not show +1 but show the new bid amount (current + 1) and that
value should be posted when he clicks, so there is no confusion over
the amount he is bidding. By keeping all the bids in the database
then you have a history of what happened.

You will need something like
user has many bids
auction has many bids
bid belongs to user
bid belongs to auction

Colin

Ok sorry, im learning :) this is my first post here.

Ok! yes that makes sense. that way my users wont be confused or the system
hopefully wont be broken if there is a lot of activity at the same time.

Alrighty. That is what I thought i would need to do for the associations.
Thanks for your help Colin, I will do some more reading on those
associations in the Rails Guides. I will need help with the methods once I
have that established, if you dont mind. Thanks for your time.
Clay

Can I check that you have already worked right through a good tutorial
such as railstutorial.org (including doing the exercises and so on).
If not then I highly recommend doing so, it will save you (and us)
time in the long run.

Colin

I started it but never finished it. I will go through it all a did I have any more questions I will let you know: thanks for your help Colin... Have a good one.

No I did not finish that... I will try to finish it and if I have any more questions, I will let you know. Thanks Colin!