Hi there, I'm having a hard time to properly define things for an application that has Users, Questions and Answers. Questions contains all questions any user can answer. Answers contains the specific answers provided by each user for some or all questions. Some Users could have answered to only some questions or none or all of them. So, the number of Answers entries associated with the User is variable.
I have the following tables/models:
Table users (id, name, etc) Table questions (id, question, position) Table answers (id, answer, question_id, user_id)
class User < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :answers, :dependent => true has_many :questions, :through => :answers ..... end
class Question < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :answers, :dependent => true has_many :users, :through => :answers end
class Answer < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user belongs_to :question, :order => 'position' end
I was able to show all questions (with answers) associated with a specific user with the following (view) code:
Controller: @user = User.find(params[:id])
View: <% @user.answers.each do |answer| %> <b><%= answer.question.question %></b> - <%= answer.answer %> <% end %>
Now, I wanted to be able to add/edit answers to some/all questions using one single view. Is that possible? What would be the code (controller, view, etc) to perform that? Do I need to change tables/models?
Now, a more generic question: how can I manipulate a many to many relationship between two tables where I need to have extra attributes in the table that connects them (say, the "answers" table)? By this question I mean, how to I add rows to the "answers" table?
Any help will be very appreciated. Eduardo.