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.