:has_many and :belongs_to: how do they work

Rails
1

I am new to rails, and don’t know how :has many and :belongs to work,
but I really like the idea of being able to say, for example
email.accounts, and I was wonderign what the requirements are. Does this
system work off of foreign keys, or does it work off of a system like
this
for example
email table

email account

Accounts table

name email

meaning, that it matches the two email fieldnames?

2

Accounts table

name email

meaning, that it matches the two email fieldnames?

By default, ActiveRecord expects foreign keys to be named

_id.
In your example, account would have a field called email_id of type
:integer. You can then use belongs_to and has_many.

I would also suggest you spend some time trawling the web for
tutorials/books. There are many out there and they’ll help you
understand how Rails is put together.

Max

3

Thanks for your help and time. I am a novice at both rails, and
databases, so sometimes I can code things, but I don 't understand how
they work.

4

Ben, I highly suggest you get the book Agile Development on Rails, and
read
it. It will give you a good understanding of how Rails works. Without a
good
understanding of the underlying technology, you’ll probably keep running
into walls when coding. But once you understanding it, coding becomes
fairly
simple.

On 8/21/06, Ben [email protected] wrote:

–
“Impossible is nothing.”