activerecord - rails model has_many of itself

Question

I have a event model. Events can have parent events, set from a column in the model (parent_event_id). I need to be able to do has_many :event on the model, so I can just do, for example, event.child_event or event.parent_event. But my googling hasn't worked out that well.

My Model:

class Event < ActiveRecord::Base
    attr_accessible :days_before, :event_name, :event_date, :list_id, :recipient_email, :recipient_name, :parent_event_id, :is_deleted, :user_id

    belongs_to :user
    has_many :event_email
    has_many :event
end

My Schema:

create_table "events", :force => true do |t|
    t.datetime "event_date"
    t.integer  "days_before"
    t.string   "recipient_email"
    t.integer  "list_id"
    t.string   "recipient_name"
    t.datetime "created_at",                         :null => false
    t.datetime "updated_at",                         :null => false
    t.integer  "user_id"
    t.string   "event_name"
    t.integer  "parent_event_id"
    t.boolean  "is_deleted",      :default => false
end

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18791874/rails-model-has-many-of-itself

Answer 1

This is a self-referential model, you can try something like this:

class Event < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :parent, :class_name => "Event", :foreign_key => "parent_event_id"
  has_many :child_events, :class_name => "Event", :foreign_key => "child_event_id"
end

That way, you can call @event.parent to get an ActiveRecord Event object and @event.child_events to get an ActiveRecord collection of Event objects