RoR Associations - has_many :through valid or invalid usage?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello everyone,

I came across with the following case and I was wondering if using a has_many through association is a valid solution.

Let's say we have three models: A, B and C. The association between model A and model B is a 1 to 1 association with B having a Foreign Key to A. Now, the association between B and C is a 1 to many association with C having a Foreign Key to B. There's an action where I need to create an xml representation of some of the properties of each instance in a collection of A objects. Additionally, for each instance of A, I need to append to its serialized representation two properties from each instance of C. This C instance is associated somehow to the A instance through an instance of B.

To create the xml for each instance of A, I will need to iterate over each A instance, for each A instance I will need to read two attributes of its corresponding C instances. I want to avoid unnecessary trips to the database, therefore, I would like to load the A instances together with its somehow corresponding C instances outside the loop for the xml creation. I thought to add a has_many through association in A like this:

class A < ActiverRecord::Base   has_many :cs, through: :b end

so later I could do the following:

as = A.all.includes(:cs) as.each do |a|   xml.prop_1 a.prop_1   xml.prop_2 a.prop_2   a.cs.each do |c|     xml.prop_3 = c.prop_3     xml.prop_4 = c.prop_4   end end

that way, I avoid some unnecessary trips to the database. However, I am not sure if this approach is correct. According to the Rails documentation, the examples about the has_many :through association illustrates its usage when B has a 1 to many association to both A and C, in other words, a Foreign Key to A and C respectively. The association in my case between A, B and C is different. So I am not sure if adding a has_many through in my case would be a valid solution. I checked the final result and apparently it's working as expected, but I would like to know if I am missing something with this approach.

I am going to look at the rails source code to try to find out if this approach is valid or not, but in the meantime any help to confirm if it is acceptable to use a has_many through, why and why not, would be really appreciated.

2

Jorge,

Although I have heard of people using a has_many in some cases when the actual domain model might want a has_one (for example, if your business rule is that the association can have only one at a time and you want to keep the old join table records around with an “expired” field), generally I would recommend using has_one where has_one is appropriate.

has_one shouldn’t preclude you from being able to create many-to-many relationships on the table B (or rather from B->C), nor should it disable you from being able to join together multiple eager loading associations in your finder.

It will however change the naming of your relationships, and it may mean you wind up with some law-of-demeter violations down the road.

In short, I would recommend using a has_one unless you have a compelling reason to do it with has_many. Two examples of compelling reasons: 1) You want to preserve old join records like I said above, or 2) You will want to change this relationship to many-to-many soon (within 3 months) and you want to plan for that change.

Take a step back and consider that all Rails associations are doing are adding “utility” methods to your object. How you use them, and how elegant you find the code that is produced, is subjective and at the end of the day still in your court. So use them as best you can to make the most elegant code you can. (Performance considerations aside)

On a side note, I would strongly encourage you to look into Active Model serializer to encapsulate the serialization logic.

Finally, I would note that one little trick you can do to enforce a has_one-like behavior while actually using has_many is in your join model you could use validates_uniqueness_of to enforce that the join table has 1 and only 1 record for a User, like so:

class Memberships

belongs_to :user

belongs_to :club

validates_uniqueness_of :user

end

This would enforce that a user is a member of only 1 club at a time, but keeps the club_id out of the User model (which is nice & clean). In the future, I could add “acts_as_paranoid” to this model (using https://github.com/radar/paranoia), and then I’d still keep those old join records in the table marked as “delete_at” if I wanted a history of the user’s old memberships. (And since paranoia will monkeypatch all manner of finder methods, it won’t conflict with the validates_uniqueness_of so I will achieve the effect of enforcing that a User is a member of only 1 club at a time and I will have a history of the clubs they belongs to in the past)

Hope this helps.

Jason

3

Jorge,

Although I have heard of people using a has_many in some cases when the actual domain model might want a has_one (for example, if your business rule is that the association can have only one at a time and you want to keep the old join table records around with an “expired” field), generally I would recommend using has_one where has_one is appropriate.

has_one shouldn’t preclude you from being able to create many-to-many relationships on the table B (or rather from B->C), nor should it disable you from being able to join together multiple eager loading associations in your finder.

It will however change the naming of your relationships, and it may mean you wind up with some law-of-demeter violations down the road.

In short, I would recommend using a has_one unless you have a compelling reason to do it with has_many. Two examples of compelling reasons: 1) You want to preserve old join records like I said above, or 2) You will want to change this relationship to many-to-many soon (within 3 months) and you want to plan for that change.

Take a step back and consider that all Rails associations are doing are adding “utility” methods to your object. How you use them, and how elegant you find the code that is produced, is subjective and at the end of the day still in your court. So use them as best you can to make the most elegant code you can. (Performance considerations aside)

On a side note, I would strongly encourage you to look into Active Model serializer to encapsulate the serialization logic.

Finally, I would note that one little trick you can do to enforce a has_one-like behavior while actually using has_many is in your join model you could use validates_uniqueness_of to enforce that the join table has 1 and only 1 record for a User, like so:

class Memberships

belongs_to :user

belongs_to :club

validates_uniqueness_of :user

end

This won’t work, unfortunately - validates_uniqueness_of is expecting a column name. Swapping in :user_id would, though.

Hello everyone,

I came across with the following case and I was wondering if using a has_many through association is a valid solution.

Let’s say we have three models: A, B and C. The association between model A and model B is a 1 to 1 association with B having a Foreign Key to A. Now, the association between B and C is a 1 to many association with C having a Foreign Key to B. There’s an action where I need to create an xml representation of some of the properties of each instance in a collection of A objects. Additionally, for each instance of A, I need to append to its serialized representation two properties from each instance of C. This C instance is associated somehow to the A instance through an instance of B.

To create the xml for each instance of A, I will need to iterate over each A instance, for each A instance I will need to read two attributes of its corresponding C instances. I want to avoid unnecessary trips to the database, therefore, I would like to load the A instances together with its somehow corresponding C instances outside the loop for the xml creation. I thought to add a has_many through association in A like this:

class A < ActiverRecord::Base has_many :cs, through: :b end

This is missing a part. The through option takes the name of another association on the same class. If I’m reading you correctly, your models look something like this:

class A < ActiveRecord::Base

has_one :b

has_many :cs, through: :b

end

class B < ActiveRecord::Base

belongs_to :a

has_many :cs

end

class C < ActiveRecord::Base

belongs_to :b

end

In this case, you can certainly load As together with the corresponding Cs using include:

a_ids = [1,2,3,4] # presumably you start with ids, or some other data sufficient to find records

all_the_as = A.include(:cs).find(a_ids) # this loads the specified A records, together with all their corresponding C records

The above code will load ALL the A records at once. If this isn’t a good idea (maybe a_ids has 30k ids in it…) then read up on find_each / find_in_batches to do things more efficiently.

–Matt Jones

4

of course!

No piece of code that I write on a mailing list has actually been run, it’s just all from my brain. Take all advice with a skeptical eye for omissions/errors like that.