Let's make a Ruby on Rails app that allows us to list some of our favorite actors and movies. We should be able to perform all of the CRUD operations on both Actors and Movies. Additionally, we should be able to indicate which actors are in which movies.

Actors and Movies have an interesting relationship because a Movie can have many Actors and an Actor can also have many Movies. This is a classic many-to-many problem. If we try to use a one-to-many relationship we would either limit a Movie to having one Actor or an Actor to appearing in only one Movie.

One approach would be to decide what we'd need for Actors and Movies separately, and then think about joining them later. Another approach would be to get the relationships setup first and then fill out the rest of your app. I don't know which is better. I took the first approach but I feel dirty admitting it.

We'll need routes, a model, and a controller. Look into resources for creating the necessary routes and rails generate (rails g) for creating models (and migrations) and controllers.

It will be the same as what you did for Movies, but for Actors this time.

A few things need to happen at this phase. You'll need to make decisions around:

• setting up the many-to-many relationship in the database and models,
• setting up the routes and controller actions, and
• integrating this feature into your UI.

This assignment is purposely open-ended. You get to take what you learned (right, guys?) in the weekend lab and integrate in the many-to-many relationship that we discussed this morning. On one hand it's nothing too different from what you've done, on the other it's a sizeable lab with many pieces to put together.

The only requirements are that you allow the user to indicate that many actors can appear in a movie and an individual actor can appear in many different movies. How to do that is largely left up to you.