Question

I’m creating my own little task system in Ruby on Rails, but I need some guidance on what to call my attributes, and if I’m thinking about the right solution.

So I have a Task model.

A task can have two relations to a user: The creator and the user that’s responsible for the task.

I can of course just call my attributes: creator:integer, and a responsible:integer, but what is the preferred Ruby on Rails way of doing this?

Should they just be called the above, or creator_user_id:integer or should I make a relation table with a user_id and a task_id and then a role?

Answer 1

In your migration you’ll want the following:

class CreateTasks < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :tasks do |t|
      t.references :creator
      t.references :responsible

      t.timestamps
    end
    add_index :tasks, :creator_id
    add_index :tasks, :responsible_id
  end
end

This was generated by: rails g model task creator:references responsible:references

In your database this will create a tasks table with two columns: creator_id and responsible_id. By default Ruby on Rails will think that these columns refer to two ActiveRecord models, Creator and Responsible. However, as you want these to refer to your User model you’ll need to add the following to your Task model:

In app/models/tasks.rb

class Tasks < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :creator, :class_name => 'User'
  belongs_to :responsible, :class_name => 'User'
end

This will tell Ruby on Rails to use the User model for these relations. So when you do something like task.creator you’ll get back a User model, and the same for task.responsible.