Relationship Type in Rails

Hi I am very new rails 开发者_开发知识库, would need some help , there is nothing similar I could find , i watch all the rail casts on the similar lines.

So I have a article model and user model ( devise ) .

I would to user to add article either in Follow Mode or Just Read Later Mode.

so UserArticleAssociation has article_id , user_id and association type . I am not understanding how to implement this feature correctly. I could make some hack to do these , but I don't want to.

Any tutorial on similar will be great help.

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Try this:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :user_articles

  has_many :read_user_articles, :class_name => "UserArticle", 
              :conditions => {:mode => "read"}

  has_many :follow_user_articles, :class_name => "UserArticle", 
              :conditions => {:mode => "follow"}

  has_many :articles,       :through => :user_articles

  has_many :read_articles,  :through => :read_user_articles, :source => :article
  has_many :follow_articles,:through => :follow_user_articles,:source => :article

end    

# Add a column called mode of type string (follow, read)
class UserArticle < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :article
end

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :user_articles
  has_many :read_user_articles, :class_name => "UserArticle", 
              :conditions => {:mode => "read"}

  has_many :follow_user_articles, :class_name => "UserArticle", 
              :conditions => {:mode => "follow"}

  has_many :readers,  :through => :read_user_articles, :source => :user
  has_many :followers,:through => :follow_user_articles,:source => :user
end

Now you can do the following:

To add an article to read/follow category:

user.read_articles << article
user.follow_articles << article

OR

article.reader << user
article.follower << user

To access the articles

user.read_articles
user.follow_articles

To access the users

article.readers
article.followers

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You should use has_many :through association. There is a Railscast about it here: http://railscasts.com/episodes/47-two-many-to-many