General Confusion
I have bands which can have 3 genres. I read in a previous SO post that the proper way to handle this is a couple steps:
1) In band.rb
has_and_belongs_to_many :genres
2) Create a band_genres join table
Even after reading the documentation, I am a bit confused as to what HABTM actually means. I guess I would just normally think "a band has many genres", not has and belongs to many. So a quick DUMBED down explanation of that would be great.
Confusion with Fixtures
Also, when doing my fixture for band_genres I have
{
"The Reaper Band and Funk": { "band": "The Reaper Band", "genre": "Funk" },
"The Reaper Band and Rock": { "band": "The Reaper Band", "genre": "Rock" }
}
And I get a "unknown" band column. I thought rails was supposed to know that "The Reaper Band" would refer to a band from a band fixture (same name of course) and would grab that id and know that "band" in this fixture would refer to band_id in the join table. I would rather my fixtures look like this than have hard coded numbers.
Confusion With Factories
When I create a band in my factory, I want to assign it genres:
Factory.define :band do |f|
f.sequence(:name) { |n| "Band#{n}" }
f.mailing_lists { |mailing_lists| [mailing_lists.association(:mailing_list)] }
f.genres 2
end
I realize here I would probably need a hard coded genre_id. But why doesn't rails look at that and say "oh, he wants to add genre with id=2 to the band_genres table".
I am not expecting rails to take care of all the dirty work for me, but I do want to play by the rules.