Same has_many and has_one?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I think I've just thoroughly confused myself at this point. I have a class that has a has_many and has_one relationship that use the same object.

Here is an example:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base     has_many :hobbies     has_one :favorite_hobby, :class_name => "Hobby" end

class Hobby < ActiveRecord::Base     belongs_to :person     belongs_to :person, :foreign_key => "favorite_hobby_id" end

Of course, this doesn't work. Any ideas what I need to change to get this to work properly?

Thanks.

2

Hrm - maybe I should just quote my actual code rather than the example. Actually, technically, no - the "hobbies" are NOT shared between people. So two people can't share the same hobby.

Each Person has their own list of hobbies, and one of those is their "favorite" and I dont want to have some "favorite" boolean. My actual code has nothing to do with people and hobbies, this was just a (poor) example.

Thanks for the help!

Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

3

I’m new so I don’t have the full answer, but without the favorite boolean, behind the scenes I think a table of “HobbyFavorite” would be needed that has person_id and hobby_id, unless I’m missing something.

So it sounds like you need two “has_one” relationships defined?

both Person and Hobby would have: has_one: favorite_hobby

You then could have a FavoriteHobby model object with belongs_to: person

belongs_to: hobby

I’m not 100% this would work or is a good idea, but nobody else has suggested anything yet, so I’m trying to learn in the process. Take any of the above with a HUGE chunk of salt:)

4

Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

Rick wrote: [...]

I'm new so I don't have the full answer, but without the favorite boolean, behind the scenes I think a table of "HobbyFavorite" would be needed that has person_id and hobby_id, unless I'm missing something.

Since there would be a 1:1 association between Person and HobbyFavorite, that would actually be functionally equivalent to just having a hobby_favorite_id in Person.

That is exactly how the database looks. Instead of people and hobbies, my code actually uses Users and Characters. The People/Hobby was just another example. Each user can have any number of characters, but only one character is marked as the "selected character".

The users table has a selected_character_id, and the characters table has a user_id.

Thanks.

5

OK...then how about

class User   has_many :characters   belongs_to :selected_character, :class_name => 'Character' end

class Character   belongs_to :user end

That did it! I have no idea why my brain tends to reverse the belongs and has relationships sometimes. Thanks a lot for your help.

6

The Barge wrote: [...]

That did it! I have no idea why my brain tends to reverse the belongs and has relationships sometimes.

Well, in this case, the selected_character relationship is backwards from what it "should" be. I wouldn't have figured that out immediately either. :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot for your help.

You're welcome.

Best,