Hello,
I’m not sure if I’m missing something blindingly obvious here.
All the relationships that Rails comes with assume 0…n, yes? It’s
not a strict 1 to 1 or 1 to n because it’s optional. My question is
this -
What is the best way to implement a required relationship?
For example, if I require that a comment is made by a user (a user
has many comments, a comment has one user). Is it enough to say in
the comment model
validates_presence_of :user_id
or is there another, more rails-y way of doing this?
Thanks,
Gavin
Gavin,
There are two lines that you need in the comment model. Rather than
saying
a comment has_one user, it belongs_to a user. The difference is that
the
foreign key is located in the comment table.
belongs_to :user
validates_presence_of :user
By declaring the symbol :user in these method calls, Active Record
automatically finds the class User and the field in the comments table
user_id and maps these rules that that field.
The belongs_to method works hand in hand with the has_many and has_one
methods in the corresponding models. Basically, if the model has a
foreign
key field in it’s table, then in needs a belong to. Your not
constrianed to
only use the user_id field name for user. You can tell AR to map a
foreign
key to any field.
ie for projects you may have fields in the table (to map to a user
record)
created_by
project_manager_id
in the project model
belongs_to :creator, :foreign_key => “created_by”, :class_name => “User”
belongs_to :project_manager, :foreign_key => “project_manager_id”,
:class_name => “User”
in the user model
has_many :project_managements, :class_name => “Project”, :foreign_key =>
“project_manager_id”
has_many :created_projects, :class_name => “Project”, :foreign_key =>
“created_by”
There are a number of options for both of these method calls that can be
found in the docs.
Hopefully this helps.