CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-3ruby-on-rails-3.1
Yogzzz
Yogzzz

Reputation: 2795

How to generate a Join table in Rails

I have a products model in my rails app, and with in the products table is a categories column, which is comma separated. I want to create a join table (product_categories) so that the categories are no longer comma separated (making it easier to count etc). Im am planning on joining by id on the product table and have id, product_id and categories on the join table.

Is it best practice to run a migration to create a join table or should I generate a model then run the migration to create the join table?

I am running rails 3.1.0.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3928

Answers (1)

Jacob Mattison
Jacob Mattison

Reputation: 51062

Either approach can work; this is basically the difference between has_many :through and has_and_belongs_to_many.

If you need to interact with the join itself as a model (e.g. put validations on it, add additional metadata, etc.) then you should generate a model for the join, and define the relationship as has_many :through.

However, in your case, it doesn't seem likely that you'll need to add extra information about a given product-category join, so it may make more sense to just create a migration for the join table and use a has_and_belongs_to_many relation.

Upvotes: 2

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