Problems with getting firstname from user in habtm relationship

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hey there..

In my view i have:

<%= @event.invited %>

In my event.rb I have:

class Event < ActiveRecord::Base   has_and_belongs_to_many :users

  def invited     users.compact.join(", ")   end end

In my users.rb I have:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base   has_and_belongs_to_many :events end

The output I get in my view, when calling @event.invited is: #, #

My question is, how do I get it to output the names of the users, instead of just the # .. I have tried doing a:

for user in users do   user.first_name end

But that outputs # #

What am I doing wrong?

Thank you soo much in advance! -Jesper

2

Jesper,

Looking at the info you provided, there's nothing which actually retrieves something from the database.

Lets say you've done:

@event = Event.find(:all)

then with your model as is you can refer to then do:

invited = @event.users (assuming that merely the presence of a relationship between an event and a user means they're invited).

if you're only after the name then you could do:

invited = @event.users.collect! {|u| u.name}.join(',')

You might also changing your model to a :has_many :though approach which lets you easily store attributed in the join table which, for event management, would be very appropriate. Then you can have a status code in the join table like "invited", "accepted", "scumbag didn't show", "spam with many offers" or whatever you want.

If you follow this approach then your model would be something like:

class Event :has_many :event_records :has_many :users, :though => :event_records

In your controller @invited = @event.users.find(:conditions => "event_records.status = 'invited'")

And in your view <% for invited in @invited %>     <%= invited.name %> <% end %>

Hope this helps (at least a little)

Cheers, --Kip