Question

I have users and projects. User can have many projects and project can have many users. Now project has a particular user as an author or the creator, ie. project has one creator and that creator is also a user. How do I map this relation in rails !!!

Answer 1

#Project
has_and_belongs_to_many :users
belongs_to :author, :class_name => "User"

#User
has_and_belongs_to_many :projects
has_many :authored_projects, :class_name => "Project", :foreign_key => "author_id"

And you need to add author_id to the projects table.

So you can use: project.author, user.authored_projects, etc