Could not find the association problem in Rails

Question

I am fairly new to Ruby on Rails, and I clearly have an active record association problem, but I can't solve it on my own.

Given the three model classes with their associations:

# application_form.rb
class ApplicationForm < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :questions, :through => :form_questions
end

# question.rb
class Question < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :section
  has_many :application_forms, :through => :form_questions
end

# form_question.rb
class FormQuestion < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :question
  belongs_to :application_form
  belongs_to :question_type
  has_many :answers, :through => :form_question_answers
end

But when I execute the controller to add questions to application forms, I get the error:

ActiveRecord::HasManyThroughAssociationNotFoundError in Application_forms#show

Showing app/views/application_forms/show.html.erb where line #9 raised:

Could not find the association :form_questions in model ApplicationForm

Can anyone point out what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

You need to include a

has_many :form_question_answers

In your FormQuestion model. The :through expects a table that's already been declared in the model.

Same goes for your other models -- you can't supply a has_many :through association until you've first declared the has_many

# application_form.rb
class ApplicationForm < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :form_questions
  has_many :questions, :through => :form_questions
end

# question.rb
class Question < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :section
  has_many :form_questions
  has_many :application_forms, :through => :form_questions
end

# form_question.rb
class FormQuestion < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :question
  belongs_to :application_form
  belongs_to :question_type
  has_many :form_question_answers
  has_many :answers, :through => :form_question_answers
end

It looks like your schema might be a bit wonky, but the point is you always need to add the has_many for the join table first, then add the through.

Answer 2

In the ApplicationForm class, you need to specify ApplicationForms's relationship to 'form_questions'. It doesn't know about it yet. Anywhere you use the :through, you need to tell it where to find that record first. Same problem with your other classes.

So

# application_form.rb
class ApplicationForm < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :form_questions
  has_many :questions, :through => :form_questions
end

# question.rb
class Question < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :section
  has_many :form_questions
  has_many :application_forms, :through => :form_questions
end

# form_question.rb
class FormQuestion < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :question
  belongs_to :application_form
  belongs_to :question_type
  has_many :form_questions_answers
  has_many :answers, :through => :form_question_answers
end

That is assuming that's how you have it set up.