Hello,

I'm new at active record association in rails so i don't know how to solve the following problem:

I have a tables called 'meetings' and 'users'. I have correctly associated these two together by making a table 'participants' and set the following association statements:

class Meeting < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :participants, :dependent => :destroy
    has_many :users, :through => :participants

and

class Participant < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :meeting
    belongs_to :user

and the last model

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :participants, :dependent => :destroy

At this point all is going well and i can access the user values of attending participants of a specific meeting by calling @meeting.users in the normal meeting>show.html.erb view.

Now i want to make connections between these participants. Therefore i made a model called 'connections' and created the columns of 'meeting_id', 'user_id' and 'connected_user_id'. So these connections are kinda like friendships within a certain meeting.

My question is: How can i set the model associations so i can easily control these connections?

I would like to see a solution where i could use

@meeting.users.each do |user|
    user.connections.each do |c|
        <do something>
    end
end

I tried this by changing the model of meetings to this:

class Meeting < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :participants, :dependent => :destroy
    has_many :users, :through => :participants
    has_many :connections, :dependent => :destroy
    has_many :participating_user_connections, :through => :connections, :source => :user

Please, does anyone have a solution/tip how to solve this the rails way?