Question

Given this relationship:

class Doc < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :articles
end

and

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :docs 
end

How would you approach sorting the articles in the Doc with jQuery UI? I was following this tutorial, which was all well and good until it came time to run this migration:

rails g migration add_position_to_faqs position:integer

because it seems like doubling-up when I already have a relationship table, thus:

create_table "articles_docs", :id => false, :force => true do |t|
  t.integer "article_id"
  t.integer "doc_id"
end

add_index "articles_docs", ["article_id", "doc_id"], :name => "index_articles_docs_on_article_id_and_doc_id", :unique => true

Any thoughts at all? Not really understanding the relationship table isn’t helping me figure this out.

Answer 1

Use has_many :through instead of has_and_belongs_to_many. That will give you an intermediary model to hold the position column, and you’ll sort those rather than sorting the articles.