Ruby on Rails/Activerecord mySQL modeling

This is a pretty simple question really, but let's say I'm creating a model for Person. Person obviously has first name, last name, age, etc. But the person also has contact info consisting of things like address l开发者_如何学编程ine 1, address line 2, city, state, zip, country, phone 1, phone 2, etc...

Does it make more sense to create a model for Person and then list that contact information as tables in the model or to also create, say, a ContactInfo (or Address, etc) model, then associate the Person to ContactInfo through an association (Person has_one ContactInfo/Person has_one Address/Address belongs_to Person, etc)?

Which of these is a better approach and what are the benefits/drawbacks to each method?

edit: in re to j..

So with this approach, would I have to then create an Addressable model?

script/generate model Addressable

class Addressable < ActiveRecord::Base
    #stuff here?
end

or is this unnecessary?

Also, would i need to add this line to the create_users.rb:

t.references :addressable, :polymorphic => true

I feel like I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what. I appreciate the help a ton, btw! Thanks!

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I'd create separated tables/models for address, phone and stuff like this and would make them polymorphic. Like this:

class Address < ActiveRecord::Base
   belongs_to :addressable, :polymorphic => true
end

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
   has_one :address, :as => :addressable
end

I believe this is the best way because later you may need to add, for example, a Company model and it'll be easy to make it addressable.

Edit

Using the address as example, you'd need an Address model, not Addressable.

And you'll have to add

t.references :addressable, :polymorphic => true

or

t.belongs_to :addressable, :polymorphic => true

to your create_addresses migration, so you'll have the addressable_id and addressable_type in the addresses table.

Let me know if you have any other doubts :]

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the answer above makes sense, but think about how many fields you need and how many records you have to manage. creating a table for each additional field may be too much effort.

another approach could be something more flexible: create a table (say, person_details) with 3 fields: person_id:integer, field_name:string, field_data:string, then the model:

class PersonDetail < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :person
end

this way you can add whatever additional field you need: phone1..phoneN, address1..addressN, and so on.

another similar approach is to pre-determine fields names, to avoid different labels during inserts:

class PersonDetail < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :person

  FIELD_NAMES => { 'Address' => 1, 'Phone' => 2)
end

in this case you'll declare the field_name as integer (because it stores only the value of the hash, not a string).