Building views for an extended HABTM

Hi

I'm hoping someone will be able to put me out of my misery with this
HABTM problem I have because it's doing my head in.

I have an application to draw charts of key performance Indicators
(KPIs). A chart can have many KPIs and a KPI can appear on many
charts. So I have models:

Chart
Kpi

and a HABTM relationship between them using a join table called
charts_kpis. This all worked like a dream. I had a form that allowed
the user to specify their chart details (title, size etc) and select
which KPIs to display on the chart using checkboxes to select the
KPIs. It was cool!

The I started to add some additional attributes. For example a KPI can
be displayed in a different colour on each chart and the lines/bar can
be a different width. So I added some attributes to my charts_kpis
table which now has the structure:

id - PK
kpi_id - references kpis table
chart_id - references charts table
kpi_colour_id - references kpi_colours table. A model exists for this
and defines a hasMany relationship with charts_kpis table
width - width to display this KPI on this chart

Here I started to run into problems. In the end I dissolved the HABTM
relationship between charts and kpis and resorted to:

Chart hasMany ChartsKpi
ChartsKpi belongsTo Chart
Kpi hasMany ChartsKpi
ChartsKpi belongsTo Kpi

and, of course

KpiColour hasMany ChartsKpi
ChartsKpi belongsTo KpiColour

However the lengths I've had to go to to get the add/edit forms to
work (well, the edit form still isn't working right) leads me to think
that I've really gone about this the wrong way. What I want is a form
that allows the user to add/edit the chart details (in the charts
table) at the top and below this to select the KPIs that they want
(using a checkbox) and select the colour and set the width for the
KPIs they've selected. (This is very difficult to describe without a
picture). There's many more attributes to follow once I have this
'simple' case working.

Should I have been able to do this using the original HABTM
relationship?

Thanks in advance

David
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