ActiveRecord collection_select and has_and_belongs_to_many

Rails
1

Hello everyone, first post to the list and a relative newbie to Rails
development. Done quite a bit of JSP, PHP, HTML, XML etc and thought I
would
kick the tires on Rails to see if it can speed up development for
internal
applications. Anyway, I am running into a problem that is just driving
me
crazy and everything I read on the net doesn’t seem to help. I was
hoping
someone here might have had the same problem and be able to point me in
the
right direction.

Database Schema:

table employees
id
name

table projects
id
name

table project_roles
id
name

table project_members
id
employee_id
project_id
role_id

I then have the following ActiveRecord objects:

class Employee < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :project_members, :join_table =>
“project_members”, :class_name => “ProjectMember”
end

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :project_members, :join_table =>
“project_members”, :class_name => “ProjectMember”
end

class ProjectRole < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :project_members, :join_table =>
“project_members”, :class_name => “ProjectMember”
end

class ProjectMember < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :project
belongs_to :employee
belongs_to :project_role
set_table_name “project_members”
end

The next thing I want to do is to display a multi-select list box, on
the
project form, and display all of the employees that when selected will
add
the proper entries into the project_members table. I would be happy to
write
a method that gets called on submission and transforms the @params into
the
appropriate ActiveRecord requests, but I cannot get the list to display
with
collection_select no matter what I try.

Can someone point me in the right direction? Am I using the
has_and_belongs_to_many relationship wrong? Is it useless to try to get
this
kind of a relationship to show up using collection_select? Is there some
other parameters that I need to use that I am not? Is there a better
pattern
for these type of relationships with regards to integrating them into
the
MVC paradigm?

Any help would be appreciated as I am Googled out!

Keith

2

You might wan to have a look at through associations for this:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/ThroughAssociations.

I’ve also found that using checkboxes is easier for habtm relationships.
Take the following relationship:

class Project < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :members
end

class Member < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :projects
end

Your ‘edit member’ view might show a list of checkboxes for each
project:

<% for project in @projects %>
<%=check_box_tag name=“member[project_ids]”,
project.id,
@member.projects.include?(project) %>
<% end %>

When this is submitted rails will automatically update the joiner table
with the checked associations.

Also, I might be wrong in your case, but you shouldn’t have to specify
all the table data in your models - Rails will pick all that up for you.
For example:

Take the following tables:
parents
children

You models will look like this:

class Parent < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :children
end

class Child < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :parent
end

Rails will do all the hard work for you.

Wow - i really got going on that reply :0)

Hope it helps,

Steve