Question

I’m having trouble figuring out the best way to do this. I have a User model and a Tournament model and I set up a has_many :through relation between these two models called ‘followed_tournaments’ so that users can follow a tournament. As such, I already have a has_many :tournaments in the User model and a has_many :users in the Tournament model so that a tournament has many followers and a user can follow many tournaments.

I’d like to set up another habtm or has_many :through relationship so that a User can be considered a “contributor” to a Tournament — a completely separate relationship than what I already set up. I’d like a tournament to have any number of contributors and the user to contribute to many tournaments.

What’s the best way to go about implementing this?

Answer 1

Use source or class_name

class Tournament < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :users # ... whatever

  has_many :contributions

  # using class_name
  has_many :contributors, :through => :contributions

  # using source
  has_many :contributors, :through => :contributions, :source => :user
end

class Contribution < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :tournament

  # using class_name
  belongs_to :contributor, :class_name => 'User'

  # using source
  belongs_to :user
end