Rails 3 ActiveRecord Query questions

Question

I've implemented "following" function. Showing "people user A is following" was simple, but showing "people who are following user A" is giving me troubles.

I have follow_links, which have id, user_id, and follow_you_id column. When user A begins following user B, the columns will be like (user_id = A, follow_you_id = B).

To show users that A(@user) is following, I can simply do

@follow_yous = @user.follow_yous

But I'm not sure how to show users who are following A(@user)

To do this, I first found all the related links.

@follow_links = FollowLink.where(:follow_you_id => @user.id)

Now I thought I could just do @follow_mes = @follow_links.users, but it says user is an undefined method. So I guess I can either call user.follow_yous or follow_you.users.

My next approach was

@follow_links = FollowLink.where(:follow_you_id => @user.id)
@follow_mes = User.where(:id => @user.id, :include => @follow_links)

I intended to find all the User objects that had the provided @follow_links objects, but I think the syntax was wrong. I couldn't find a decent solution after a bit of research. I'd appreciate any help.

Update: FollowLink model

  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :follow_you, :class_name => "User"

Answer 1

You can use joins like this:

@users = User.joins(:follow_links).where(:follow_links => { :follow_you_id => @user.id })

Answer 2

you can use following:

@follow_links = FollowLink.where(:follow_you_id => @user.id)
@follow_links.collect(&:user) # :user should be the name of your relation to user in your followlink model
=> [User1, User2,...]