--0-287761359-11892032133660 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Toby, Seeing as ActiveRecord is part of Rails, you ought to post this question to the "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. ----- Original Message ---- From: Toby O'Rourke <ruby / tobyandbecswedding.info> To: ruby-talk ML <ruby-talk / ruby-lang.org> Sent: Friday, September 7, 2007 3:59:53 PM Subject: enforce mutual exclusivity Hi, First post, sorry if this is the wrong place or has been answered before. I'm using ActiveRecord and I want to enforce mutual exclusivity on a has_and_belongs_to_many. A concrete example: I have a User which can have one or more Roles (student, tutor, headmaster, administrator etc). However if a user is a student they cannot hold any other role. I was hoping to find something like validate_exclusive but that doesn't appear to exist. Can anyone suggest how I can implement this. Otherwise, is there a better pattern I could use to model this? Many thanks, Toby. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! oneSearch: Finally, mobile search that gives answers, not web links. http://mobile.yahoo.com/mobileweb/onesearch?refer=1ONXIC --0-287761359-11892032133660--