Question

I have this in my schema:

create_table "robots_matches", :force => true do |t|
t.integer  "robot_id"
t.integer  "match_id"

and I think I want to be able to load a robot and match from within my robots_match model so I can do something like this:
robots_match.find(:id).get_robot().Name

My attempt in the robots_matches model was this:

def get_robot
Robot.find(this.id)
end

I am super new to rails, so feel free to correct my architectural decision here.

Answer 1

I would consider starting with the models below.
This allow a match to have many robots and also a robot to have many matches, via ‘Linker‘.
Then you can do queries like Robot.find(1).matches or Match.find(1).robots

class Robot < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many linkers
  has_many matches, :through => linkers

class Linker < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :robots
  belongs_to :matches

class Match < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many linkers
  has_many robots, :through => linkers