Can a model have both a has_many and has_many through?

I’ll try to explain this as best as I can… I have an Assignment and
User model, with users having many assignments and the assignment
belonging to a user. But, along with assignments having one owner, I’d
like for assignments to have multiple “secondary” owners, through the
use of “has_many :through => assignments_users”. Is this possible? I
tried to implement this but I got an error saying an assignment with
the user id of 1 can’t be found, when there were assignments with the
user_id as 1, but it was looking through the assignments_users table.
Thanks!

Andrew wrote:

I’ll try to explain this as best as I can… I have an Assignment and
User model, with users having many assignments and the assignment
belonging to a user. But, along with assignments having one owner, I’d
like for assignments to have multiple “secondary” owners, through the
use of “has_many :through => assignments_users”. Is this possible? I
tried to implement this but I got an error saying an assignment with
the user id of 1 can’t be found, when there were assignments with the
user_id as 1, but it was looking through the assignments_users table.
Thanks!

User
has_many :assignments_users
has_many :assignments, :through => :assignments_users
end

Assignment
has_many :assignments_users
has_many :users, :through => :assignments_users
belong_to :owner, :class => User, :foreign_key => :owner_id
end

AssignmentUser
belongs_to :assignment
belongs_to :user
end

Would provide these message:
@user.assignments
@assignment.users
@assignment.owner

However, I would likely alter the naming of these objects somewhat.

Something like:

User
has_many :assignments
has_many :projects, :through => :assignments
end

Project
has_many :assignments
has_many :users, :through => :assignments
belong_to :owner, :class => User, :foreign_key => :owner_id
end

Assignment
belongs_to :project
belongs_to :user
end

In this case User and Project are solidly nouns. Assignment (although
could be a noun) servers better for linking Users to Projects. However,
this is really just semantics, although I do make an effort to give my
joining models a good solid name when using has_many :through.

I like this because the act of assigning a project to a user can be more
easily thought of from a RESTful perspective. In order to “create” an
association between a user and a project, one would create an
assignment.

assignments_controller

def create
user # assume this exists
project # assume this exists
@assignment = Assignment.new
@assignment.user = user
@assignment.project = project
end

Note: The above code is intended for demonstration purposes only. This
could be re-factored to reduce the complexity of the controller code.