Comunidad Prode keep on growing

Exactly 2 years ago, first commit to the git repo was made

Today, I am releasing code base 3.0, which in terms of end users, means support for not only "league-style" tournaments, but also "cup-style". The reason is quite straightforward: the ability to play predictions for the FIFA World Cup 2014, given the large group of users who asked for this feature.

Since this is a programming blog, lets go to the point. From the domain perspective, even though this is arguably, there were differences on how to represent a match as it was, versus a world cup match (knockout match from now on). Even though the match has a date and time to be played, we never wanted to tie that to the match just because AFA schedule is a real mess, with kickoff times changing from one day to another. That said, the decision was for the week to have a date (one week has many matches), and past that date, the related match results can no longer be predicted.

The situation for the knockout matches was different, we did want to predict on a match by match basis, and we needed to group them by an identifier (group A, group B, semi-final, etc).   

Now, when a user predicts a match, that gets persisted as a user_match. The relation between both is that each user match belongs to match, but now, it can also belong to a knockout match. How to achieve this, at least decently? I had the opportunity to use active record polymorphic associations a year ago or so, and I saw a perfect fit here for that as well. Here is the outcome.

 class Match < ActiveRecord::Base  
   has_many :user_matches, as: :related_match  
   ...  
 end  

 class KnockoutMatch < ActiveRecord::Base
   has_many :user_matches, as: :related_match
   ...
 end

 class UserMatch < ActiveRecord::Base
   belongs_to :related_match, polymorphic: true # match or knockout_match
   ...
 end

so now, by calling user_match.related_match you will get the associated "real" match, no matter if it is a match or a knockout match, for instance, to get the real score and calculate the user prediction points.

The rest of the changes are just around that, and those who don't, are the usual gem version upgrades to stay up to date, for instance, bump rails from 4.0.4 to 4.1.0, as well as ruby from 2.0.0 to 2.1.1.