Need help for Best Approach to Model

Rails
1

Hello -

I am new to Rails (and Ruby), and would appreciate some guidance on
the best way to model this situation:

I am creating a game website, that will require users to register on
the site before they can play the game. I may have multiple instances
of the game running at any given time. A registered user must also
register for the game(s) they want to play. So far, I have the
following models & relationships:

Game
has_many :players (:users???)
has_one :prize

User
belongs_to :game ???

Prize
belongs_to :game

When a User registers for a Game, I want to create a record that will
store progress information for that User, for that Game (a User may be
registered for multiple games). The key to this record may be game_id
& user_id. Or, the key may be an auto-generated integer, but if so,
then I think I need to hold onto game_id & user_id as attributes.

I am trying to figure out the best “rails way” to model this using
Rails 2.1.

Do I need a Player model, or will that be maintained via the
relationships?

Player
belongs_to :game ???
has_one :user ???

Thanks for any help that can be offered.

2

You will most likely need an intermediate table like UserGames
(or PlayerGames if you prefer)

Game:
has_many :user_games
has_many :users, :through => :user_games

User:
has_many :user_games
has_many :games, :through => :user_games

this requires the table UserGames with the user_id and game_id fields

the second association definition will allow you to get all
users in a game (or all games of a user) like:

@user = User.find(:first,…)
@user.games