Question

I am setting up private messaging in my application and was wondering what the best way to do this would be, I have a message model that has 2 columns, a to_id and from_id

I have the association set in the message model like so:

class Message < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :recipient, :class_name => 'User', :foreign_key => "to_id"
  belongs_to :sender, :class_name => 'User', :foreign_key => "from_id"

end

How would i set up the relationship in the user model? i want to have a :received messages association and a :sent_messages Association.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can specify the :foreign_key on both sides, like this:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :sent_messages, :class_name => 'Message', :foreign_key => 'from_id'
  has_many :received_messages, :class_name => 'Message', :foreign_key => 'to_id'
end

I know Rails 3 has an :inverse_of option you can pass as well, but I don’t have any experience with that.