Sinatra ActiveRecord Associations: Join Tables

By now, you're familiar with the basic ActiveRecord associations: has_many and belongs_to. But how would you handle an e-commerce site? If you think about the models, there would be a User class and an Item class, which would contain all the items a user could buy. A user could select to purchase many items, so your first instinct might be to store user_id as a column of the Items table. But with an online store, many many users could select to buy the same item, so you would need to store more than one user_id. Clearly that option wouldn't work. Basically, we're dealing with a many-to-many relationship. A user can have many items, and an item can belong to many users.

This is where Join Tables come in to play, with the has_many :through association, which is used for object associations where more than one object can own many objects of the same class.

In the owner and pet has_many and belongs_to relationship, we store the owner_id on the pets table. We use the foreign key to store our relationship .

A join table is a table that connects records that are related, but in different tables themselves. To keep up with the online store example, this table would contain a user_id and item_id. Each row in this table would contain a user's ID and an item's ID. We call this join table user_items, because the name makes it clear that we are linking the users and the items tables.

Migrations

First, we need to create three migrations: one for the users table, one for the items table, and the join table -- user_items.

class CreateUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :users do |t|
      t.string :name
      t.timestamps null: false
    end
  end
end

class CreateItems < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :items do |t|
      t.string :name
      t.integer :price
      t.timestamps null: false
    end
  end
end
 
class CreateUserItems < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change 
    create_table :user_items do |t|
      t.integer :user_id
      t.integer :item_id
      t.timestamps null: false
    end
  end
end

In these migrations, we create three tables with columns. You'll notice the last table is our join table. The user_items table has two columns: user_id and item_id.

Models

Next we need to define the appropriate relationships in our three models.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :user_items
  has_many :items, through: :user_items
end

class Item < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :user_items
  has_many :users, through: :user_items
end

class UserItem < ActiveRecord::Base 
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :item
end

Our User class has two associations. The first is a has_many association with the join table, and the second is the has_many through: to connect users and items.

We set up a similar pattern of relationships for the Item class, this time to connect items to users.

And finally, we have the model for the join table, UserItem. In this model, we set up a belongs_to for both users and items.

ActiveRecord Methods

This gives us access to the users who have purchased a particular item, as well as all the items purchased by a specific user.

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