How to assign a has_many/belongs_to relation properly in Rails ActiveRecord?

Question

I have a rails app with articles and author model. If I have an author and a post and want to indicate that the author should be the owner of the article, or that the articl

Answer 1

IMHO, the correct way of doing that is creating a instance method on your Article class, like the following:

class Author < ActiveRecord::Base
  ...
  def add_an_article(article)
    unless self.articles.include?(article)
      self.articles << article
    end
  end

end

This will provide a better semantic to your model and encapsulate the logic of the association manipulation...

That way, your class also will be compliant to Tell-don't-ask principle: http://pragprog.com/articles/tell-dont-ask.

Unfortunately, most of the Rails community ignores good OO principles and prefer the easiest but not right way of doing something!