Question

I have an application which has projects and users. I don’t care about tracking the many-to-many relationships between users and projects but I am interested in tracking the many-to-one relationship between projects and a specific user, which is the project manager. Ideally, I would like to create a column in the projects table called projectmanager_id and link it to a user. However, rails convention dictates that I use user_id instead. While this works, I feel the semantics aren’t quite right. Is there a way to have both?

One way I thought of is to create a projectmanagers table with user_id and project_id and have a has_many :projects, :through=> :projectmanagers in the user model, and has_one :user, :through => :projectmanagers in the project model. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

You could try this if you keep the db column as user_id:
In your project.rb file:

belongs_to :projectmanager, :foreign_key => “user_id”, :class_name => “User”

And in your user.rb file still have:

has_many :projects

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Or if it’s that you want your db column to be projectmanager_id

In your project.rb file:

belongs_to :projectmanager, :foreign_key => “projectmanager_id”, :class_name => “User”

In your user.rb file:

has_many :projects, :foreign_key => “projectmanager_id”, :class => “Project”