Relationships Revisited

Rails
1

Ok…so I posted yesterday regarding relationships between:

Users
Products
Purchases

Thanks all for the answers; very informative. What I’m really running
up against is more an issue like Dave T. describes wrt
articles/users/reads in ADWR. So, using that as the OM:

Articles
Users
Reads

Dave uses the has_and_belongs_to_many idiom to join Users and Articles
via Reads without ever promoting “Reads” to a proper model. My
questions is: is this still the current train of thought in the rails
community (meaning just using habtm).

Dave does suggest that the users_articles table is just a mask for
what should be a model, so assuming that I do promote Reads to a
model…let’s talk relationships:

  • A User has many reads
  • A Read belongs to a user
  • An Article technically doesn’t belong to anything
  • Does a Read have an explicit relationship to an Article? What is that
    relationship? Why am I confounded re: something that seems so trivial.

Arrrgh! Help!

2

Hi Cory, Read does have an explicit relationship to an Article as you
can
see in the model. Please see the code snippet below:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :readings
end

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :readings
end

class Reading < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :article
belongs_to :user
end

What are you trying to accomplish within your project?

-Conrad