I'm trying to create a rails app that allows users to submit information about their pets.  I've come to a point where my knowledge is limited and I don't know enough about what/how this could be done so I'm hoping this will be relatively easy to answer.At the moment I have a model called Pet, this model currently stores basic information like name, picture etc but it also holds more specific data like type, breed, date of birth etc.  What I would like to be able to do is create a page that can match various records without having to be manually categorized if that makes sense so a users pet could be matched to other pets with the same breed, age etc.I've read about nested models as I understand this information could be submitted to 2 models in one form but I am not sure whether this could be done directly in a separate controller which would only be visible to users with pets in these matched groups if that makes sense.  So in essence is it best practice to use 1 table to store all the information and just use a controller to match pets based on rows having the same values or would it be far simpler to have a form with a nested model and link 2 tables together?The main feature needs to be matching without a user having to create a group or categorize pets so the second model would need to add id's to an array instead of just creating more and more rows.
model association or controller?
ruby on rails
I've used both one table and two tables.  The nice thing about two tables is you can perform additional queries on the details of the pets table and, say pet_details - plus, it keeps the tables smaller and easier to manage.With a nested model, you wouldn't necessarily create a new controller unless you wanted to directly manipulate the data through the web or an API for your nested model.  The parent model Pet would handle all the manipulation of that data.  TL;DR - it basically just keeps it more organized.