I have a Cubicle model that will have many Printers, Phones, whatever. In the past, HABTM has sufficied, but each of the joins will need the capability to store additional attributes inside of the respective table. From what I've read, this is only a feature of using a join model -- has_many :through it is.
I want to be able to do @cubicle.printers, @cubicle.phones, etc. as well as @phone.cubicle, @printer.cubicle, so the relationship needs to be bidirectional. What I have is functioning, but given that this is my first time using has_many :through, I'd like to run my solution by the group to see if 1) I am setting up the relationships correctly and 2) if there is a better (cleaner?) way. For each join case, I create a model and a table. So for the cubicles <--> printers relationship, I have a model cubilces_printer.rb, a table called cubicles_printers that has the necessary foreign keys and additional attributes, and establish the relationships as so: CubiclePrinter belongs_to :cubicle belongs_to :printer Printer has_many :cubicles_printers has_many :cubicles :through => :cubicles_printers Cubicle has_many :cubicles_printers has_many :printers :through => :cubicles_printers I think this is right, it just feels odd initially building the middle layer model. My brain wants to just say Cubicle has_many :printers given that the Printer model is already defined and have Rails just know, sort of like HABTM, to look for the join in the cubicles_printers table. But I guess the difference comes in with the additional model attributes. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
