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 => "admin@domain.com", :password => "admin")

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

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered May 01 '11 at 22:30

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 => "admin@domain.com", :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 => "admin@domain.com", :password => "admin")
u.roles << Role.find_by_name("super_admin")

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 24 '16 at 03:41

Typically I save the objects into some variable:

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


#Setup and initial super admin user
admin = User.create(:first_name => "admin")
johny = User.create(:first_name => "johny tables")

then as I just push them into the associative array:

admin.roles << supr << schl << schs
johny.roles << stut

Or you can just create them when you are pushing them into the associative array, so there would be no need to pass so many variables around.

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

2 Answers2