Simple Association

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello, I am new to rails and I need a little help getting started with a simple association. Here is what I am trying to do.

I have a model, message, which has text and a user (do not need to worry about associating users to messages right now). These messages come in and I would like to create a response for each, which itself is a message. Then I would like to create a transaction paring these responses and requests.

@request = Message.create(:text => "Some text") @response = Message.create(:text => "Some text back") @some_transaction = Transaction.create(:request => @request.id, :response => @response.id)

From there I would like to be able to sort through each transaction: @some_transaction.request.text

How are these associations formed? When generating the models do I need to have columns for request/response or request_id/response_id?

Thanks for any help!

2

Here's a good place to start reading:

Some other notes:

- 'Transaction' is not going to work as a model name; ActiveRecord uses that name internally, and redefining it may cause extremely peculiar malfunctions.

- if messages are paired strictly one-to-one with replies, it may make more sense to omit the intermediate model entirely and just define a has_one/belongs_to pair.

--Matt Jones