Models relations definition

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi, got an issue here ^^ Ok so my problem is that I have a table named "users_accounts" and another one named "accounts_messages". As you will guess, accounts_messages is a list of messages that "users_accounts" can interchange. Here comes my problem: for each message I need to know who is the autor and the destinator, so in "accounts_messages" I have two parameters which are: autor_user_account_id (refers to the autor account) and user_account_id (refers to the destinator account).

So in my AccountMessage ruby model class I want to refer two times to the users_accounts table. How do I do that? More precisely my question is how do I do to keep the relation navigability for the two parameters? If I declare those two lines: class AccountMessage < ActiveRecord::Base     belongs_to :autor_user_account     belongs_to :user_account

    ... end

obviously autor_user_account wont refer alone to the UserAccount class. So how can I declare those two parameters in order to use them that way for exemple:

message = AccountMessage.find(...) printf "autor name: #{message.autor_user_account.name}" printf "destinator name: #{message.user_account.name}"

We supose here that the "users_accounts" table has a name property of course.

Hope it's understandable :slight_smile: Olivier.

2

Hi, got an issue here ^^ Ok so my problem is that I have a table named "users_accounts" and another one named "accounts_messages". As you will guess, accounts_messages is a list of messages that "users_accounts" can interchange. Here comes my problem: for each message I need to know who is the autor and the destinator, so in "accounts_messages" I have two parameters which are: autor_user_account_id (refers to the autor account) and user_account_id (refers to the destinator account).

So in my AccountMessage ruby model class I want to refer two times to the users_accounts table. How do I do that? More precisely my question is how do I do to keep the relation navigability for the two parameters? If I declare those two lines: class AccountMessage < ActiveRecord::Base    belongs_to :autor_user_account    belongs_to :user_account

   ... end

Look into the :class_name and :foreign_key parameters that go along
with belongs_to/has_one/has_many.

:class_name      Specify the class name of the association. Use it only if that
name can‘t be inferred from the association name. So has_one :author
will by default be linked to the Author class, but if the real class
name is Person, you‘ll have to specify it with this option.

:foreign_key      Specify the foreign key used for the association. By default this
is guessed to be the name of the association with an "_id" suffix. So
a class that defines a belongs_to :person association will use
"person_id" as the default :foreign_key. Similarly,
belongs_to :favorite_person, :class_name => "Person" will use a
foreign key of "favorite_person_id".

3

Great, thank you very mucho for the help! ^^