non-"table_id" foreign key

rubyonrails-talk
1

Okay folks, I'm feeling like a fool. I'm sure I'm not the first person to run into this, but I can't find the necessary info.

Basically I need to create two tables. The first to hold actual content. And the second to link pairs of content records. For example, a "persons" table and a "friends" table that pairs up two person records. Obviously, I can't have two fields in the friends table named 'person_id'. So how do I assign a field as a foreign key, that isn't named in the default format "table_id"?

2

your table friends:

has left_person_id right_person_id

so class Friend

...

  belongs_to :right_person, :class_name => 'Person', :foreign_key => 'right_person_id'   belongs_to :left_person, :class_name => 'Person', :foreign_key => 'left_person_id'

3

check out this article and the comments to it, someone did exactly something like this...

http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/articles/2006/04/21/self-referential-through

4

igotimac, Thorsten L, & Bryan - Thank you all so much! You'll ROCK!