Exploring Monster Taming Mechanics in Final Fantasy XIII-2: Asking Deeper Questions

So far in this Exploring Monster Taming Mechanics series, we've parsed a bunch of data, built up database tables, and connected them together in a website with some filtering sprinkled in. This setup allows us to browse around the data pretty easily and ask some basic questions of the data. Now it's time to think about how we can ask deeper questions. Instead of just asking things like, "What monsters have the Auto-Bravery ability," we want to be able to ask, "Where is the earliest location where I can get a monster with the Auto-Bravery ability?" Sounds like a useful think to know, right? Let's figure it out.

Exploring Monster Taming Mechanics in Final Fantasy XIII-2: Filtering Monsters

We've finished building up views and controllers in the Rails MVC architecture for the various tables of monster data we have in this Final Fantasy XIII-2 monster taming mechanics series. However, some of the navigation for the latest monster details page and ability table pages is a bit clunky, so we're going to improve that today. First, when a link is clicked in the monster details page to go to the ability table, the clicked ability is highlighted, but the user needs to search through the table to find the highlighted row. We'll see how to go to the desired row directly. Then, we want to make the return trip from a link in the ability table take the user to a monster table that shows only the monsters that have that ability. Let's see how it's done.