Rails has_many through a HABTM relationship - ruby-on-rails

Question

So I have three models, User, Team, and Game. Currently constructed as such.
class Team < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :users
has_many :home_games, class_name: 'Game', foreign_key: 'home_team_id'
has_many :away_games, class_name: 'Game', foreign_key: 'away_team_id'
has_many :wins, class_name: 'Game', foreign_key: 'winner_id'
belongs_to :owner, class_name: 'User'
end
class User < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :teams
has_many :teams_owned, class_name: 'Team', foreign_key: 'owner_id'
has_many :games, through: :teams
end
class Game < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :home_team, class_name: "Team"
belongs_to :away_team, class_name: "Team"
belongs_to :winner, class_name: "Team", optional: true
end
I want to add an association between users and games. So I can call User.games and Game.users.
I tried adding this:
#in user model
has_many :games, through: :teams
#in team model
has_many :games, ->(team) { where('home_team_id = ? or away_team_id = ?', team.id, team.id) }, class_name: 'Game'
As the api docs said to do. But, when I try to call this association, I get an error that "game.team_id does not exist". Since each game has a home_team_id and away_team_id, but no team_id.
Did I just implement this extremely poorly? Or am I missing something? Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

I would say this isn't a really good solution.
In ActiveRecord you can't actually define associations where the foreign key can potentially be in two different columns like this:
has_many :games, ->(team) { where('home_team_id = ? or away_team_id = ?', team.id, team.id) }, class_name: 'Game'
It definitely won't work as Rails will still join the assocation as JOIN games ON games.team_id = teams.id. Just adding a WHERE clause to the query won't fix that. Since ActiveRecord actually creates a variety of different queries there is no option to simply provide a different join.
A kludge to make this work would be to add an instance method:
class Game < ApplicationRecord
def users
User.joins(:teams)
.where(teams: { id: home_team.id })
.or(Team.where(id: away_team.id))
end
end
As its not an actual association you cant join through it or use an sort of eager loading to avoid n+1 queries.
If you actually want to create a single association that you can join through you would need to add a join table between games and teams.
class Team < ApplicationRecord
# ...
has_many :game_teams
has_many :games, through: :game_teams
end
# rails g model game_team team:belongs_to game:belongs_to score:integer
class GameTeam < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :team
belongs_to :game
end
class Game < ApplicationRecord
has_many :game_teams
has_many :teams, through: :game_teams
has_many :users, through: :teams
end
This is a better idea since it gives you a logical place to record the score per team.
As an aside if the composition of teams can change and accurate record keeping is important you might actually need additional join tables as the lineup when a game is played may not actually match the current lineup.