How to get the created_at of the many to many association of User with friends in Rails 6?-CodePudding

I have 2 tables, one user and other friends, I have set up a relationship such that the user can follow one another.

class Friendship < ApplicationRecord
 belongs_to :user
 belongs_to :friend, class_name: "User"
end

class User < ApplicationRecord
 has_many :posts
 has_many :friendships
 has_many :likes
 has_many :comments
 has_many :friends, through: :friendships

I have set up @friends = current_user.friends in the user's controller which fetches me all the friends, but I also want to get the timestamp when the friendship was formed.

Friendship Table Attributes: id, user_id, friend_id, created_at, updated_at

User Table Attributes: id, email, password, ..., created_at, updated_at

I want to get the all the current user's friends and also the created_at from the friendship table i.e. when the friendship was formed.

CodePudding user response：

When you want to present the friendship's creation date too then the easiest way would be to load the user's friendships instead of their friends.

Instead of

@friends = current_user.friends

you could write

# in your controller
@friendships = current_user.friendships.include(:friend)

# in the view
<% @friendships.each do |friendship| %>
  The friend <%= friendship.friend %>
  since <% friendship.created_at %>
<% end %>

Btw I added the include to the query to avoid N 1 queries.