ActiveRecord: creating a one-to-many relationship back to itself

Question

Hi, I'm building a social networking website. I have a table of Users. Each user can have a number of other users as friends, so I have a second table Friends:

user_id
friend_id

Based on this answer I'm trying to create the relationships. I have,

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :friends, :dependent => :destroy
  has_many :users, :through => :friends

  has_many :source_friend, :class_name => "Friend", :foreign_key => "friend_id", :dependent => :destroy
  has_many :source_users, :class_name => "User", :through => :friend_id
  ...

and

class Friend < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :source_friend, :class_name => "User", :foreign_key => "friend_id"
end

When I try and use the tables with this in my view:

<% @user.users.each do |friend| %>
  <% if friend.status == User::ACTIVE %>
    <p>
      <%= link_to h(friend.name), :controller => "user", :id => h(friend.name)%>
    </p>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

the names returned are always those of the source user, rather than the target friend.

Answer 1

Okay, I've solved it: change the second entry under User to:

  has_many :users, :through => :friends, :source => :source_friend

I'm still not sure if the code in the question has some unneeded crud in there?