Question

I have a controller and two models, a user and a store.
A user has_many stores. Inside stores I have a method get_items which lists items.
get_items itself needs a reference to the user.
What I have done now is the following

@items = user.stores.first.get_items(user)

this looks weird to me since the initial caller has to pass itself as an argument to the get_items method.
What would you recommend?

best,
phil

Answer 1

If you’ve defined the relation in two directions,

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :stores
end

class Store < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
end

then you have access to the user that a store belongs to within the Store instance. So you should be able to write

def get_items
   do_something_with user
end

and it should use the correct user. The call to get_items could then be

@items = user.stores.first.get_items

I would personally rename get_items to items.