Joining tables in Rails through relation table - ruby-on-rails

I have three classes; User, Feed, and Entries. Users have one or more Feeds and Feeds have one or more Entries:
class Feed < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :entries
has_many :feeds_users
has_many :users, :through => :feeds_users, :class_name => "User"
end
Class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :feeds_users
has_many :feeds, :through => :feeds_users, :class_name => "Feed"
end
class Entry < ActiveRecord:Base
belongs_to :feed
end
The User and Feed classes are related through a third table:
class FeedsUser < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
belongs_to :feed
end
Now, my problem is that I need to get a certain user's feeds and each feed's latest n entries. I'm fiddling with something like this:
u = User.first
Feed.joins(:entries, :users).where(:entries => { :created_at => (Time.now-2.days)..Time.now }, :users => u)
My problem here is that this generates some SQL that tries to query "users" on the table "feeds" - which doesn't exist.
How do I go about creating a correct query that can give me all feeds and their latest 10 entries for a given user?

Take out has_many :feeds_users. :feeds_users shouldn't be a model.
You should keep the table, but some Rails magic goes on behind the scenes. If you have a table named feeds and a table named users, Rails derives the table name of the look-up unless you specify it differently.
For your example:
Class Feed < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :users
end
Class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :feeds
end
It will look for the relationship in the users_feeds table. If it looked like this:
Class Feed < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
end
Class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :feeds
end
It would look for the relationship in the user_feeds table.
It's linguistically correct, as many users will have many feeds in the first example, and one user will have many feeds in the second example. That's also a good indicator of whether your relation logic is correct.
It also sounds like you need the has_and_belongs_to_many relationship instead of just has_many.
For a complete run-down on all forms of model associations, check out the guide.

Related

has_many and belongs_to with join table

I have Users and Trucks. I want the ability to say #truck.drivers << #users and #user.truck = #truck.
The solution is simple until I want the relationship to be stored in a join table.
# tables
:users
:id
:truck_drivers
:user_id
:truck_id
:truck
:id
I've gotten it to where I can say #truck.drivers << #user and #user.trucks << #truck, but I would like to limit a user to occupy one truck at a time, for my sanity.
Is it possible? A has_many/belongs_to with a join table? Or should I try a different approach? I'm not using a third model for the join table. It's just a table. Here's what I have so far.
class User < ApplicationRecord
has_and_belongs_to_many :trucks,
join_table: :truck_drivers, # points to the table
class_name: :Truck # looks for the truck model in the table
end
class Truck < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :company
has_and_belongs_to_many :drivers,
join_table: :truck_drivers,
class_name: :User
end
The reason I need a join table in the first place is because each User can have many Roles: Admin, Manager, Driver, Customer Service, etc. I thought it didn't make sense to add a truck_id to all the users if all the users are not going to be using trucks.
It seems like you ought to be able to do something like:
#user.trucks << #truck unless #user.trucks.any?
Yes this is a standard strategy with rails using the :through keyword.
rails documentation: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#the-has-many-through-association
Make a model called TruckUser with truck_id and user_id
then edit your classes:
class User < ApplicationRecord
has_many :truck_users
has_many :trucks, through: :truck_users
end
class Truck < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :company
has_many :truck_users
has_many :drivers, through: :truck_users
end
class TruckUser < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :truck
belongs_to :user
end

Ruby on Rails 4 - How to get a has_many association for a group of users?

I have the following setup in my database. We have users. Each user has many entries. Users also belong to organizations, through a table called organization_users.
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :entries
has_many :organization_users
has_many :organizations, :through => :organization_users
end
class Entry < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
end
class Organization < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :organization_users
has_many :users, :through => :organization_users
end
class OrganizationUser < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
belongs_to :organization
end
Here's my question: for a given organization, I want to get a list of all the entries for the users in that organization. Is there a nice compact way to accomplish this? I know I can iterate over all users in the organization and get the entries, but I'm not sure if there is a nice rails-y way to do this.
You can do the following assuming you have a foreign key called organization_id in organization_users table as per your Model
Entry.joins(:user => :organization_users).where("organization_users.organization_id = ?", org_id)
Where org_id is the id of the given organization. This will give you all entries of all users in an organization
Try something like that :
my_org = Organization.find(id)
my_org.users.eager_load(:entries)
First you get the organization you want to query. Then via :through association you can directly retrieve all the users for that organization. And last using eager_load, in one query you get all the entries. The result will be an ActiveRecord::Relation.

Can a has and belongs to many association not call a query on the associated object

I have two models Activities and Users
class Activity < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :users
end
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :activities
end
I can load all the activities which are associated with users by calling
User.all.includes(:activities)
But this actually pulls up all my activity objects from the database, which can cause performance problems as the table is quite large. My requirement is only to get the activity_ids associated
I can directly get that by executing the plain sql on the join table
select activity_id from activities_users where user_id in (...)
My question is:
Can I do get the above functionality in a rails friendly way
From has_and_belongs_to_many you could do things like #User.find(1).activity_ids
In terms of including them for a collection to avoid an n+1 query I don't think you can do it any way other than the way you've currently got it.
If you make it a has_many_through it'll have a model:
class Activity < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :user_activities
has_many :users, through: :user_activities
end
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :user_activities
has_many :activities, through: :user_activities
end
class UserActivity < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user
belongs_to :activity
end
Then you can do #users = User.includes(:user_activities).all so when you loop over them and do something like it should avoid the n+1 query because you've already loaded them in.
#users.each do |user|
user.activity_ids
end

has_many and belongs_to of the same model

I am pretty new to rails. I am trying to figure out the most efficient way to create a relationship between two models that states:
A user can "favorite" many songs
A song has an owner.
This is what I am thinking of doing. Does it make sense ?
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :songs #songs this user has favorited
end
class Song < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user #the user whom submitted this song
end
My concern about this method is that I'm unsure about the efficiency of doing query on every song in the database just to figure out which songs a particular user owns. Is there a different way I should be thinking about this ?
By the way, is there a method by which I can call the attribute something different than it's model name. So rather than User.find(1).songs[0] I could say User.find(1).favorites[0] even though the model is still a "Song".
You'll need 2 separate relationships between the User and Song models. Namely, you'll need an 'owner' relationship and a 'favorite' relationship. The 'owner' relationship can be a simple has_many/belongs_to as you have it now. The 'favorite' relationship is many-to-many and will need a join table used either as a habtm table or a first class model with a has_many through relationship as explained here.
The generallly recommended approach is to use has_many through as it gives you better control:
class User
has_many :songs # these are songs 'owned' by the user
has_many :user_favorite_songs
has_many :favorite_songs, :through => :user_favorite_songs # these are the favorites
end
class Song
belongs_to :user
has_many :user_favorite_songs
end
class UserFavoriteSong
belongs_to :user
belongs_to :favorite_song, :class_name => 'Song', :foreign_key => :song_id
end
This looks perfectly fine.
Rails associations try to be most efficient - don't prematurely optimize.
You can alias the association's name like so:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :favorites, class_name: 'Song'
end
see the docs about associations.
Regarding performance anyway, you might want to have a look at the :inverse_of association option.
I haven't tested this code, but you'll need something like this.
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :favorites, :class_name => "Song" #user's favorited songs
end
class Song < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :user #the user who submitted the song
has_and_belongs_to_many :user, :as => :favorite
end
And since multiple users can favorite a song, you'll need a 'join table'
CreateUsersFavorites < ActiveRecord::Migration
def up
create_table :users_favorites do |t|
t.references :user
t.references :favorite
end
create_index :users_favorites, :user_id
create_index :users_favorites, :favorite_id
end
def down
drop_table :users_favorites
end
end
Also, I highly recommend taking a look at the rails guide for active record relationships.

What is the best way to setup my tables and relationships for this use case?

1)A user can have many causes and a cause can belong to many users.
2)A user can have many campaigns and campaigns can belong to many users. Campaigns belong to one cause.
I want to be able to assign causes or campaigns to a given user, individually. So a user can be assigned a specific campaign. OR a user could be assigned a cause and all of the campaigns of that cause should then be associated with a user.
Is that possible? And could I set it up so that the relationships could be simplified like so:
User.causes = all causes that belong to a user
User.campaigns = all campaigns that belong to user whether through a cause association or campaign association
This should work.
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :causes, :through => :cause_users
has_many :campaigns, :through => :campaign_users
# other model stuff
class Cause < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :users, :through => :cause_users
has-many :campaigns
# other model stuff
class Campaign < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :cause
has_many :users, :through => :campaign_users
# other model stuff
class CampaignUser < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :campaign
belongs_to :user
# other model stuff
class CauseUser < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :cause
belongs_to :user
# other model stuff
has_many :through requires that you create a new model for each of these joins: campaign_users and cause_users, as is shown but it provides more functionality later on than has_and_belongs_to_many.
I would also suggest using better names than :campaign_users and :cause_users so the relationship is more meaningful.
I believe you should use the following:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :causes
has_and_belongs_to_many :campaigns
end
class Cause < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :users
has_many :campaigns
end
class Campaign < ActiveRecord::Base
has_and_belongs_to_many :users
belongs_to :cause
end
This way you can use
User.causes
User.campaigns
Cause.campaing
Cause.users
Campaign.users
Campaign.cause
You can read here about has_and_belongs_to_many relationship, here about has_one and here about belongs_to.
Let me know if this is what you want :]
Edit:
"I would still need User.campaigns to
be campaigns from a user's causes or
individual campaigns associated with a
user"
You can have a method on users model that returns all campaigns. Something like this:
def all_campaigns
self.campaigns + self.causes.collect{ |c| c.campaigns }
end
You can make :has_many :through associations between users and campaigns using a join model, and also between users and causes using the another join model. The you can make a :has_many :campaigns association in the causes model, putting a :belongs_to :cause in the campaign model.
But you won't be able to fetch all the users campaigns or causes by User.campaigns.orders or User.order.campaigns. You should make an iteration over the User.campaigns collection or User.causes, fetching Campaign.cause or Cause.capaigns. Or even making a custom SQL query, using joins and conditions to filter information in the joins.

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