Has_many Join table with a belongs to for admin purposes

Question

I’m writing a rails calendar app for planning a social media editorial calendar.

My relationships are: User has_many Calendars, Calendar has_many Users

I’m trying to implement a calendar admin where the calendar also belongs to admin. The admin is whoever created the calendar.

I have searched all over here and found different options that were just has_many and belongs_to relationships, not adding the belongs_to to the join relationship.

I have tried doing:

class Calendar < ApplicationRecord
has_many :user_calendars
has_many :users, :through => :user_calendars
has_many :calendar_posts
has_many :posts, :through => :calendar_posts
belongs_to :admin, :class_name => :User

def add_calendar 
Calendar.new(admin: self)
end 

class CalendarsController < ApplicationController 

def create 
@calendar = Calendar.new(calendar_params)
current_user.add_calendar
if @calendar.save 
redirect to @calendar 
else 
render :new 
end 
end 

private 
def calendar_params
params.require(:calendar).permit(:name, :user_id)
end

This just rendered new and the only thing I got from the server log was rollback. I typed in errors and they were empty.

I’ve also tried to do something like another post I saw on here where I removed the add_calendar method from the user model and that line of code in the calendar controller and instead had a private method in the calendar controller under private:

def set_admin
@calendar.admin.id = current_user.id
end 

And at the top of calendar controller have:

before_action :set_admin, only: :create

This gave me the stack error Syntax warning

I had also tried adding a migration for adding admin column to Calendar table with integer as the type?

I do have Devise set up for user registration but was trying to Ashlie using it for this functionality if possible.

Answer 1

I see that you create a new entity calendar in the user not related to the current one on not save it. Please try:

@calendar = Calendar.new(calendar_params.merge(admin: current_user)

And yes you need to add a migration where you add admin_id to the calendar

Answer 2

def create 
  @calendar = Calendar.new(calendar_params)

  # you're just missing this line
  @calendar.admin = current_user

  # this doesn't do anything, so I commented this out
  # current_user.add_calendar

  if @calendar.save 
    redirect_to @calendar 
  else 
    render :new 
  end
end 

P.S. I do not know why you are permitting :user_id as part of def calendar_params, because your Calendar model does not actually have a :user_id attribute. The :user_id attribute is part of the UserCalendar model instead.