How to update has_many :through table? - ruby-on-rails

Question

This is a follow up question from one of my earlier questions: How to Model doctor and patient relation
I am fairly new to rails, I am making an appointment booking system between patient and doctor, I have made the relationships, set up authentication using devise. I have 3 models:
class Doctor < ApplicationRecord
has_many :appointments
has_many :patients, through: :appointments
end
class Patient < ApplicationRecord
has_many :appointments
has_many :doctors, through:appointments
end
class Appointment < ApplicationRecord
#table_columns: id | start_time| end_time| doctor_id| patient_id|slot_taken|
belongs_to :patient
belongs_to :doctor
end
I have created the appointments controller: Some actions are below:
#current_doctor comes from devise. Have created two separate models for doctor and patients using devise
def create
#appointment = current_doctor.appointments.build(appointment_params)
respond_to do |format|
if #appointment.save
format.html { redirect_to appointments_path, notice: 'Appointment was successfully created.' }
else
format.html { render :new }
end
end
end
def update
respond_to do |format|
if #appointment.update(appointment_params)
format.html { redirect_to appointments_path, notice: 'Appointment was successfully updated.' }
else
format.html { render :edit }
end
end
end
private
def appointment_params
params.require(:meeting).permit(start_time, end_time)
end
As you can see, the doctor can create the time slots of when he is available, and can edit,update and destroy the same for him/herself and when he creates one the appointment table gets updated with doctor_id, start_time and end_time.
Now, what should I do to add the patient_id and change slot_taken to true (default: false) to it? When the patient books the available slot, the appointments table should be updated with patient_id and slot_taken value. How should I update the appointments table and where should I put the code for the same?

Answer 1

First of all, some advice: I don't think two user models it's a good idea. Think it would be best have one User devise model, and that user have an Role associated for it, so you control the access type by that. If you have to add more type of users to that system, creating one model for each one can be troubling.
About the appointments, question, in a roughly way, if you have an doctor instance, and you wanna make an appointment for some patient at s start_time and e end_time, you can do something like:
doctor.appointments.find_by(start_time: s, end_time: e).update(patient_id: your_patient_id)
About where to put that, depends on how your system works. Is the client that assigns himself? Or some administrator does that?
Anyway, think you should have another action/view for doing that assignment, so you can have a form where the user can input that information, and when he sends the form, you handle it and do the update in some way like a showed before.
Hope this helps, good luck