Question

I have a many-to-many relationship between User and Task model.

A task can have many users, but it should keep track of its original creator (if a user creates one by @user.tasks.create). I was wondering how could I do this.

I would have to create a new column field called “creator” in the tasks table. I could then initalise a task in the following way:

@user.tasks.create(:creator=>@user)

Is there a way of not having to add the arguments since the creator will always be the user that instantiated the task.

Thanks!

EDIT

My User model has:

 has_many :taskization
 has_many :tasks, :through => :taskization

My Tasks model has:

  has_many :taskization
  has_many :users, :through => :taskization

Answer 1

it sounds like you’re indicating that the ‘original_creator’ is an attribute of the Task. For each Task record, you want to keep track of which User originally created it.

So, modeling that seems like you would require both:

# return the User object of the original task creator
@original_creator_user = @task.original_creator  

as well as

# get all users of this task
@users = @task.users

to work.

This requires two different relationships between Task objects and User objects.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  # tasks for this user
  has_many :taskization
  has_many :tasks, :through => :taskization

  # tasks this user was the original creator of
  has_many :created_tasks, :class_name => "Task" 

end

class Task < ActiveRecord::Base
  # users of this task
  has_many :taskization
  has_many :users, :through => :taskization

  # user who originally created this class
  belongs_to :original_creator, :class_name => "User"

end

Notice that the ‘creator’ relationship is not a :through task, it’s a relationship directly between the two objects.