Question

I have two models: Person and Relation. The second one stores information about relations between two people. It has parent_id and child_id fields and doesn`t have id field. I connected it with has_many :through and it works.

But:

1. Relation.find(:all) returns empty array even if there are some relations in the table (becouse there is no id field).
2. I don`t know how to delete relation.

My models looks like this:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base   has_many :child_relations,             :class_name => 'Relation',             :foreign_key => 'parent_id'   has_many :parent_relations,             :class_name => 'Relation',             :foreign_key => 'child_id'    has_many :children, :through => :child_relations   has_many :parents, :through => :parent_relations end  class Relation < ActiveRecord::Base   belongs_to :parent, :class_name => 'Person'   belongs_to :child, :class_name => 'Person' end 

Any suggestions?

UPDATE: I’ve used has_many :through becouse I also store information about a type of the relation in the table. Currently I gave up and I added id field to my table (Rails convention…). But my question remains open.

Answer 1

has_many :through depends on an id in the join table. It makes the join table a whole model. Since every operation with records happens with an id, you wont be able to directly interface with a table without it. When you delete a record rails generates sql to delete the record by its id. If you have a join table that acts as a full model, it must have an id

Or you can use has_and_belongs_to_many which works more like you expect. The remove a relationship you remove the object via its assocations and not directly with the relationship model.

Your best bet is to add an ID to the join table. That way in the future if the relationship model becomes more complex you can track it as its own entity.