How do you add JOIN information to a rails seeds.rb file?

Question

I'm trying to build a seeds.rb file to add an initial admin user to the database. I have a Users table and model, and a Roles table and model. I have a join table, roles_users to join the users role and permissions. Here's the schema:

  create_table "roles", :force => true do |t|
    t.string   "name"
    t.datetime "created_at"
    t.datetime "updated_at"
  end

  create_table "roles_users", :id => false, :force => true do |t|
    t.integer "role_id"
    t.integer "user_id"
  end

  create_table "users", :force => true do |t|
    t.string   "email",                               :default => "", :null => false
    t.string   "encrypted_password",   :limit => 128, :default => "", :null => false
    t.string   "reset_password_token"
    t.datetime "remember_created_at"
    t.integer  "sign_in_count",                       :default => 0
    t.datetime "current_sign_in_at"
    t.datetime "last_sign_in_at"
    t.string   "current_sign_in_ip"
    t.string   "last_sign_in_ip"
    t.datetime "created_at"
    t.datetime "updated_at"
    t.string   "first_name"
    t.string   "last_name"
  end

I've figured out how to add the Users and the Roles using the repsective models for each:

#Setup our default roles
Role.create(:name => "super_admin")
Role.create(:name => "school_leader")
Role.create(:name => "school_staff")
Role.create(:name => "student")


#Setup and initial super admin user
User.create(:first_name => "admin", :email => "[email protected]", :password => "admin")

How do I add the join to make grant the admin super_admin privileges (database being used is sqlite3)?

Answer 1

Assuming you have defined a has_and_belongs_to_many association in your User model:

has_and_belongs_to_many :roles, :join_table => "roles_users"

In your seeds.rb file, you can then add roles to a user as shown below (this example adds ALL roles to the user):

u = User.create(:first_name => "admin", :email => "[email protected]", :password => "admin")
Role.all.each { |role| u.roles << role }

To grant the user only the 'super_admin' role, you could do something like this:

u = User.create(:first_name => "admin", :email => "[email protected]", :password => "admin")
u.roles << Role.find_by_name("super_admin")