Table that have many-to-may relationship to itself

Rails
1

In a social netowrk data model, users belongs other users, and can have
many friends as users, so it is a many to many relatioship.

the class definition could be

class User < ApplicationController
has_mang_ang_belongs_to users

But how it looks like in the mysql database tables in a “joined” users
table.

The question really is: what is the table looks like when a model has
many and belongs itself.

thx

2

Hi,

This example is right out of the Rails Recipes book by Chad F.
(http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_rr/index.html):

Assume that you have people and people have friends. Just as you’ve
described, this is a habtm relationship that refers back to the same
table. Whenever you have a habtm, you need a join table. Here’s a
(partial) migration that describes the two tables:

create_table :people do |t|
t.column “name”, :string
end
create_table :friends_people, :id => false do |t|
t.column “person_id”, :integer
t.column “friend_id”, :integer
end

And now here is the ActiveRecord model:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :friends,
:class_name => “Person”,
:join_table => “friends_people”,
:association_foreign_key => “friend_id”,
:foreign_key => “person_id”
end

brian

3

You’re talking about a self-referential many-many relationship. The
Rails Recipes book has an example of how to do this, plus there are a
few other things in various places. Try googling “ruby rails
self-referential”