Question

So I have a HABTM relationship between my Students and Classrooms using a join table called ClassroomStudents to handle many students belonging to many classrooms.

A recent business requirement came up that students should be able to request memberships to a classroom, so I thought that I would just create another invitation table containing classroom_id and student_id but quickly realized my classroomstudents table already handled this so I thought about simply re-using this table. I added a boolean accepted field to my classroomstudents table, true representing a membership that has been confirmed and false being the default.

There are multiple ways in which students can be added to classrooms, one of which I want them to be accepted automatically when the relationship is built. So with the following code:

@classroom << @students

How can I also specify a true value for this boolean accepted field instead of the default of false?

Answer 1

You could make the default value in the database be true. For example, write a migration that looks like this

class MakeAcceptedDefaultToTrue < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    change_column :classroom_students, :accepted, :boolean, :default => true, :null => false
  end
end