create a many to many relationship in rails

Question

Users can vote on posts, so I set a many to many relationship in rails:

users have many votes posts have many votes

posts have many users through votes users have many posts through votes

Is there a more elegant way to create a new vote than this:

user.votes.create(:post_id => post.id).save

? thanks

Answer 1

Vote does not deserve its own entity. Just add a counter (or two) to posts model. I'd suggest following code:

user.votes_for(post)

Or in case of stackexchange platform:

user1.votes_up(post)
user2.votes_down(post)

Answer 2

There is at least a "standard" way. I assume this is coming in from a form somewhere. So just pass in params like so:

 @vote = Vote.new(params[:vote])
 @vote.user = current_user
 if @vote.save
      ...
 else
      ...
 end