I'm learning rails and trying out polymorphic association. I have listed below a couple of simple models for illustration. Model associations seems to works fine as expected. But what if a user (commenter) would like to leave a comment for a another user? I can't seems to get it to work with these configuration. How do I go about doing so?
class User < ApplicationRecord
# username, email, password_digest
has_many :comments, as: :commentable, dependent: :destroy
end
class Project < ApplicationRecord
# title, completed, user_id
has_many :comments, as: :commentable, dependent: :destroy
end
class Comment < ApplicationRecord
# commenter_id, commentable_type, commentable_id, body
belongs_to :commentable, polymorphic: true
end
in console... setup
user1 = User.frist
user2 = User.last
project = Project.first
pro_comment = project.comments.new(body: 'some text')
pro_comment.commenter_id = user1.id
pro_comment.save
user_comment = user2.comments.new(body: 'some text')
user_comment.commenter_id = user1.id
user_comment.save
expected and actual results
Comment.all => successfully lists pro_comment & user_comment
But...
Comment.find_by(commenter_id: 1) => only listed the pro_comment
(what am I doing wrong?)
Also.. user1.comments => returned an empty object... was expecting 2 objects, as you can see below it's not referencing 'commenter_id' .... result...
comment Load (0.5ms) SELECT "comments".* FROM "comments" WHERE
"comments"."commentable_id" = $1 AND "comments"."commentable_type" = $2
LIMIT $3 [["commentable_id", 1], ["commentable_type", "User"],
["LIMIT", 11]]
=> #<ActiveRecord::Associations::CollectionProxy []>
I also tried ... user1.comments.where(commenter_id: 1) >> which returned...
comment Load (0.4ms) SELECT "comments".* FROM "comments" WHERE
"comments"."commentable_id" = $1 AND "comments"."commentable_type" = $2
AND "comments"."commenter_id" = $3 LIMIT $4 [["commentable_id", 1],
["commentable_type", "User"], ["commenter_id", 1], ["LIMIT", 11]]
=> #<ActiveRecord::AssociationRelation []>
Not sure what I'm doing wrong. Could someone please point me in the right direction. I thank you for your time.
find_by
returns only one record, try Comment.where(commenter_id: 1)
instead.
For user1.comments
being empty, you are mixing the relationships. You should have 2 relationships: comment belongs to a commentable object (a project or a user) and comments also belongs to a commenter (the user you set as commenter_id).
It makes sense for user1.comments
to be empty since the user is the commenter on both comments, it's not the commentable. user2.comments
shouldn't be empty, same for project.comments
Try something like this:
class User < ApplicationRecord
has_many :comments_done, class_name: 'Comment', inverse_of: :commenter
has_many :comments, as: :commentable, dependent: :destroy
end
class Comment < ApplicationRecord
belongs_to :commenter, class_name: 'User'
belongs_to :commentable, polymorphic: true
end
(check the guide, I may be missing some config option https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v5.2/association_basics.html#has-many-association-reference)
Now you can use user1.comments_done
and user1.comments
for comments done by the user and done at the user.