Question

Currently, I can add the creator_id like this in my controller:

@entry = Entry.new(params[:entry].merge(:creator => current_user._id))

If this is my model:

class Entry
  include Mongoid::Document

belongs_to :User

  field :creator, :type => String
  field :title, :type => String
  field :content, :type => String
  field :scorea, :type => Integer
  field :scoreb, :type => Integer
  field :scorec, :type => Integer
end

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Your model doesn’t looks very good, do you really want to store the user_id in a string field?

I suggest you change your models to following:

class Entry
  include Mongoid::Document

  belongs_to :creator, :class_name => 'User', :inverse_of => :entries

  # field definitions
end

class User
  include Mongoid::Document

  has_many :entries, :inverse_of => :creator
end

Once you change the models you can continue using what you are now or alternatively:

@entry = current_user.entries.build(params[:entry])

Update:

The method to initialize entry is not much different in the way I did it. It is just more towards the rails way of doing things. The main difference is that you were not using the associations. From your model definitions it is clear that you want a one-to-many association between user and entries and this is how you create such associations. Associations has a lot of goodies attached to them, like you can do following things:

user.entries << entry # add a entry to users, will automatically change entry.creator_id
entry.creator = user  # sets creato_id = user_id
entry.creator         # returns associated user. no need to do User.find(entry.creator_id)
user.entries          # returns all entries for use <=> Entry.where(creator_id: user.id)

for more details go to http://mongoid.org/docs/relations.html