In Rails, how can I automatically update a User to own a newly created object of another class within the new object's Create method?

Question

My application has Users and Dwellings. When a user creates a dwelling, the user becomes the owner

Answer 1

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I misunderstood the user/dwelling relationship in the answer below, so this is not a solution to the problem.

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I think you're misunderstanding how associations work. With a belongs_to/has_many relationship, only the model that belongs to (in this case, Dwelling) has a foreign key pointing to the other record (in this case, User through the foreign key owner_id). The other record (User) does not need a key for every association, which would be redundant.

Likewise, you don't need to assign @dwelling to current_user.dwelling, nor do you need to save the current_user. Just saving @dwelling after building it in current_user.properties.build(params[:dwelling]) should be enough.