Rails has_many :through Find by Extra Attributes in Join Model

Stefan_Mai_13257 0
Viewed 32823

New to both Ruby and Rails but I'm book educated by now (which apparently means nothing, haha).

I've got two models, Event and User joined through a table EventUser

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :event_users
  has_many :events, :through => :event_users
end

class EventUser < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :event
  belongs_to :user

  #For clarity's sake, EventUser also has a boolean column "active", among others
end

class Event < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :event_users
  has_many :users, :through => :event_users
end

This project is a calendar, in which I have to keep track of people signing up and scratching their name out for a given event. I figure the many to many is a good approach, but I can't do something like this:

u = User.find :first
active_events = u.events.find_by_active(true)

Because events don't actually HAVE that extra data, the EventUser model does. And while I could do:

u = User.find :first
active_events = []
u.event_users.find_by_active(true).do |eu|
  active_events << eu.event
end

This seems to be contrary to "the rails way". Can anyone enlighten me, this has been bugging me for a long time tonight (this morning)?

has-many has-many-through ruby-on-rails ruby
4 Answers

How about adding something like this into your User model?

has_many  :active_events, :through => :event_users, 
          :class_name => "Event", 
          :source => :event, 
          :conditions => ['event_users.active = ?',true]

After that you should be able to get active events for a user just by calling:

User.first.active_events
user_261230

Milan Novota has a good solution – but :conditions is now deprecated and the :conditions => ['event_users.active = ?',true] bit just doesn't seem very rails anyways. I prefer something like this:

has_many :event_users
has_many :active_event_users, -> { where active: true }, class_name: 'EventUser'
has_many :active_events, :through => :active_event_users, class_name: 'Event', :source => :event

After that you should still be able to get active events for a user just by calling:

User.first.active_events
user_30070480

Even though your u.events isn't explicitly calling the user_events table, that table is still included in the SQL implicitly because of the necessary joins. So, you can still use that table in your find conditions:

u.events.find(:all, :conditions => ["user_events.active = ?", true])

Of course, if you plan to be doing this lookup a lot then sure, give it a separate association as Milan Novota suggests, but there's no requirement for you to do it that way

Gareth_315820
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