Multiple HABTM relationships with self?

Rails
1

I need to have a table related to itself via a join table. Will HABTM
support this? That is:

class Recipe < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :recipes, :join_table => “recipes_recipes”
end

More importantly – how does RoR support MULTIPLE self-joins? I.e., to
relate the table to itself via multiple join tables.

SFAIK, HABTM won’t support multiple self-joins because the method names
would get confused.

Could I create additional controllers for the class, and then use the
:class_name option to specify those controllers?

SOrt of like so:

class Recipe < ActiveRecord::Base

set_primary_key "R_ID"
has_and_belongs_to_many :recipes,  :join_table => "recipes_recipes",

:foreign_key => “R_ID”, :association_foreign_key => “R_ID2”
has_and_belongs_to_many :recipes2, :join_table =>
“recipes_recipes2”, :foreign_key => “R_ID”, :association_foreign_key =>
“R_ID2”
has_and_belongs_to_many :recipes3, :join_table =>
“recipes_recipes3”, :foreign_key => “R_ID”, :association_foreign_key =>
“R_ID2”

end

Thanks!

2

Ok - I answered my first question. HABTM works to relate a table to
itself just fine.

Now how to do it again? (And again!)

3

2nd Q A’d 2. qed

4

maybe this will help?

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowToUseManyToManyAgainstASingleTable

5

Peter M. wrote:

maybe this will help?

Peak Obsession

Geez, I had seen that article before, and was looking for it today, but
for some reason I couldn’t locate it when I needed it (doh!). A bit
late, as I already figured a way, but Thanks just same –

I think I ended up doing it somewhat differently - this article doesn’t
display everything so I can’t be sure. Since I’ve already completed this
I didn’t replicate their approach so I’m not exactly sure what’s missing
in this howto.

Anyway, all I did was create a new model for each relationship R1, R2,
…, R5 against the same table R and then within each of these new
models used set_table_name R and set_primary_id. Then it was a simple
matter to create a HABTM for each of these new self-referential joins in
the model for R. Slick! Same effect though, partially connected node
graph.

BTW are the SQL statements behind HABTM reasonably optimized? I’m using
about 5 of these self-referential queries simultaneously against a
moderately large database and it is taking about 5-10 seconds to return.
I’m wondering what is the next step for either optimizing this query or
somehow caching results dynamically or perhaps pre-caching results in
advance (hopefully without losing generality).

Thanks again –

6

dr plutes wrote:

BTW are the SQL statements behind HABTM reasonably optimized? I’m using
about 5 of these self-referential queries simultaneously against a
moderately large database and it is taking about 5-10 seconds to return.
I’m wondering what is the next step for either optimizing this query or
somehow caching results dynamically or perhaps pre-caching results in
advance (hopefully without losing generality).
I doubt they’d be overly optimised beyond the basics - it’d probably be
worth checking what turns up in the development log to see if you can
see anything obviously wrong.

And, as always, check your indices :slight_smile: