Question

I am developing an “issue tracker” app in Rails 3 but I am having trouble describing the relationship between an “Issue” and its “Status”. Each issue can only have one status – I’d like this to be a combo box in HTML – but clearly each status can be assigned to multiple issues. I started with “issue has one status” but then I ran into problems retrieving that status in the view. I assume this is correct, but I must need something else…

Answer 1

You should be using Issue belongs_to :status and Status has_many :issues instead.

When you use a has_one association, Rails will look for the foreign key issue_id in the statuses table. This is not what you want. You want issues to point to statuses, not vice versa.