Relationship of these tables are: Many to Many
Store can have many categories
Category can also have many stores
Now in the stores table I have a store_name and category_id attributes
that links the category table to the store table via its Category_ID
attribute.
The Category table only has category_id and category_description
attributes.
I want to be able to perform a search on Categories index.html.erb page
to find stores which fall into that particular category.
Therefore I need the search function to look into the stores table and
match the category_id to the category_id in categories table, and return
the store names with those categories.
I have tried some example but they don’t seem to be working. Can someone
please help!!!!
In general, a many-to-many relationship involves three tables. Can you
describe how you've done this relationship with Rails? Did you use a
has_and_belongs_to_many with a categories_stories table? Or did you
use a has_many :through association with a different through table?
yes your absolutely right. i have used a has_and_belongs_to_many with a
join table being created called categoriesstores. this join
"categoriesstores" has the attributes category_id and store_id.
Having setup the relationships and the tables, then, for example, if you have a store object from the database then you can use store.categories to get a collection of categories for that store.
A bit of googling will reveal numerous other guides and tutorials. Make sure any you work through are for rails 2 as otherwise you will get horribly confused when the tutorials don’t work.