Question

I’m working with Rails 3.2.1 and have the two models CookingVenue and DiningVenue with associated MySQL tables of cooking_venues and dining_venues. I have set up the has and belongs to many relationship between the two models but what’s the name of the MySQL table name here to represent the join?

Is it cooking_venues_dining_venues?

Will Rails try to find habtm relationships between cooking and venues etc, or is Rails really clever enough to work all this out?

Answer 1

Like you said, cooking_venues_dining_venues is the name of the join table. After creating this table with cooking_venue_id and dining_venue_id field you need to define has_and_belongs_to_many association in both model.

class CookingVenue < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :dining_venues       # foreign keys in the join table
end
class DiningVenue < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :cooking_venues    # foreign keys in the join table
end