Rails Relation Table

Question

so i'm working on a rails 4 app and i have two models a Developer and an App.

Basically i want a Developer to act as a founder and have multiple Apps and those apps belong to the Developer (founder). Then i want and app to have many collaborators and a collaborator belongs to many apps. Heres my code, is this right? An how would i lets say add a collaborator to an app?

App

has_and_belongs_to_many :collaborators, class_name: 'Developer', foreign_key: :collaborator_id
has_and_belongs_to_many :founders, class_name: 'Developer', foreign_key: :founder_id

Developer

has_and_belongs_to_many :apps, foreign_key: :collaborator_id
has_and_belongs_to_many :apps, foreign_key: :founder_id

Relations Table

def change
create_table :apps_developers, id: false do |t|
  t.references :founder, references: 'Developer'
  t.references :collaborator, references: 'Developer'

  t.references :app
  t.boolean :collaborator_pending, default: :true
end

add_index :apps_developers, [:founder_id, :app_id], unique: true
add_index :apps_developers, [:collaborator_id, :app_id, :collaborator_pending], unique: true, name: 'index_apps_collaborators'
  end

Answer 1

You should use HABTM for collaborators and has_many for founders, not the other way around.

The reason is the relationship between collaborators and apps is many-to-many, while the relationship between founders and apps is one-to-many.

/app/models/app.rb

Class App < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :founder, :class_name => 'Developer'
  has_and_belongs_to_many :collaborators, :class_name => 'Developer'
end

/app/models/developer.rb

Class Developer < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :apps, :foreign_key => :founder_id
  has_and_belongs_to_many :apps, :foreign_key => :collaborator_id
end

As for your second question, this is how you can add a collaborator to an app:

app.collaborators << developer

Where app is an object of the App class and developer is an object of the Developer class.