Creating collections of posts with Rails 5 (as in Pinterest Boards)

Question

I have over 500 posts and growing rapidly. I want to give a feature for users to create collections [title, description, posts] and assign posts to them. 1 post can belong to many collections from different users.

Example:

• User A creates a collection named "DARK DESIGNS"
• User A clicks "add to collection" button in post/show page and selects her own "Dark Design" collection
• User A goes into another post and assigns more posts into "Dark Design"
• User A sees list of her collections at her profile

Question:

How should I structure this collections feature? Should I just do scaffold collections? How should I hold post ids in database, just in a field separated with commas?

Thank you

---

I need users to be able to create collections and assign 1 post to multiple collections.

Should my database structure be like:

Existing tables

table [posts]

• id
• title
• image
• many more fields

---

table [users]

• id
• username
• many more fields

---

New tables

table [collections]

• id
• title
• desc
• user_id

---

table [collections_posts]

• id
• post_id
• collection_id

Answer 1

I think that you need a separate Collection model with title and description fields, and additional CollectionsPost model for has_many association.

class CollectionsPost < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :collection
  belongs_to :post
end
class Collection < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :collections_posts
  has_many :posts, through: :collections_posts
end
class Post < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :collections_posts
  has_many :collections, through: :collections_posts
end

And maybe Collection should belong to User, if you want to display list of users collections on the profile page.