belongs_to and has_many to the same model

Question

I am wondering whether there is a way to do this with rails or not. Basically I have a user model and an event model. Event is created by a user and I want to have a foreign key (user_id) in the event model that indicates who created the event. Additionally, event can have many users who attend it so the event model becomes something like

belongs_to :user
has_many :users, :through => :guests #suppose i have the guest model 

and the user model looks something like

has_many :events, :through => :guests

I have not tried this association yet but I want to be able to say

e = Event.find(1)
e.creator #returns the user who created this event

instead of

e.user

is there a way for me to do this?

Answer 1

Simply pass some options to belongs_to:

belongs_to :creator, :class_name => "User", :foreign_key => "user_id"

This specifies that the creator method will be a User object, referencing the user_id field.