Model, View, Controller

The overall design of our system follows the "Model, View, Controller" principle which is very much fundamental when using Rails. It allows us to write the code for our application in a clear and structured way that should be easy to understand.

We had models and controllers for Systems, Versions, Data Points and Mappings which were the individual areas of our application. A system can have many different versions which can in turn be made up of a number of different data points. The relationship between each model can be seen in more detail in the Entity-Relationship diagram for our database further down on this page.

Database Design

Our database used required four different tables in order to complete the task required. We had tables for "Systems", "Versions", "Data_Points" and "Mappings" which were related as shown in the diagram above. "Systems", "Versions" and "Data_Points" are all connected using a foreign key - we are storing the primary key from the table above it in the table. This allows us to easily find information such as the name of a system from a given set of data points. It was clear from the start that we wanted to use this approach as it is good database design practice and reduces things such as data duplication and data inconsistencies.