Has Many Through Controller

So this whole many-to-many thing has me really confused. I get how to set it up but I can’t seem to find anywhere that really explains the best way to use it in your controller.

What I have:

Products, Orders, Orders_Products

The Products and Orders table has the standard stuff (Id, name, timestamps, etc)

The Orders_Products table has the two id columns (order_id, product_id) and a quantity column.

What I need to do:

Now when I save my “cart” how do you save a new order and each product with its quantity?

This is my first app in rails so the more explanation the better.

Thanks in advance for all the help!

So this whole many-to-many thing has me really confused. I get how to set it up but I can't seem to find anywhere that really explains the best way to use it in your controller.

What I have:

Products, Orders, Orders_Products

The Products and Orders table has the standard stuff (Id, name, timestamps, etc)

The Orders_Products table has the two id columns (order_id, product_id) and a quantity column.

What do your models look like, exactly? What do your has_many and belongs_to methods read as?

What I need to do:

Now when I save my "cart" how do you save a new order and each product with its quantity?

If you have set up your models correctly to explain the relationship, then all you need to do is get a handle to your cart:

@cart = Order.find(session[:cart_id]) #for example

and then add to its products collection

@cart.products.create(params[:products]) #assuming you have a form for the products

When you save @cart, the relationship will be saved to the database, when you find @cart a second time, the @cart.products will be available to work with.

Walter

i'm very new to this too so this may be wrong (shameless disclaimer)

but....

you mentioned quantity in your question but there's no reference to quantity in your description of the models. I would think that you'd also need a quantity field in the Orders_Products model/table to support that and from my reading you would need to use has_many :through.

I'm personally battling with learning this now also so i could be wrong and don't have enough knowledge to give you the details on it all. good luck! :slight_smile:

I actually did mention quantity in my model: “The Orders_Products table has the two id columns (order_id, product_id) and a quantity column”.

My models:

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base

has_many :Orders_Products

has_many :Orders, through: :Orders_Products

end

class OrdersProduct < ActiveRecord::Base

belongs_to: Order

belongs_to: Product

end

class Order < ActiveRecord::Base

has_many :Order_Products

has_many :Products, through: :Orders_Products

end

Now my next question is when I do @cart.products.create(session[:products]), if I have more fields in the session like current price (I just added that to the database) and quantity will it save it to the Orders_Products table or will it just ignore those fields?

Thanks for all the help,

-Brandon

Correction:

class OrdersProduct < ActiveRecord::Base

belongs_to :Order

belongs_to :Product

end

Okay. I have it 90% working now. My main problem was i had has_may :table, through: :table where it should have been has_many: :table, :through => :table.

Now that I got that worked out I cant get it to save those extra columns.

My models:

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base

has\_many :Orders\_Products

That should be :orders_products all lower case, so matching the table name. The same applies to all later relationships.

Colin