Help Naming a Model in Rails

I have a patient model and a client model. A patient can have many clients and a client can have many patients. I want to create a model for the association. What do I call it?

A client is a hospital or doctor's office. A Patient is someone who needs education from a开发者_开发百科 hospital or doctors office.

What's a client? Is it a doctor of some kind?

How about registrations or enrollments?

You'd then have:

# client 
has_many :enrollments
has_many :patients, :through => :enrollments

# patient
has_many :enrollments
has_many :clients, :through => :enrollments

If you want to follow the conventions, then the names in the join table just need to be sorted alphabetically:

# create_clients_patients.rb
create_table "clients_patients", :id => false do |t|
  t.column "client_id", :integer, :null => false
  t.column "patient_id",  :integer, :null => false
end

If you need access to a model class you probably don't have to use a many-to-many association but a:

has_many :through

association which you can name as you prefer.

The many-to-many association has only table naming convention (in your example clients_patients) because you don't need to access the cross table model directly.