Rails Updating Data in one Model from another Model's Controller

I have a User model that has billing_id. I have Order model that runs transactions with a payment gateway which returns a billing id I'd like to save into the billing_id column on the User model. I think I am getting the basics of MVC architecture mixed up.

I am u开发者_StackOverflow社区nder the impression that UsersController and OrdersController update data of their respective tables. Does that mean that if I have something returned from OrdersController such as a billing id, there is no other way of saving that billing id into a billing_id column in User model? Thanks and sorry if this is extremely rudimentary. :)

Also, I thought a possible solution might be to somehow pass in the return value via ApplicationsController into UsersController to save into User table. Is this possible?

Your user orders table should have an instance of user_id, as a user can have multiple orders.

You can do this by creating a migration:

rails g migration add_user_id_to_orders order_id:integer
rake db:migrate

Your models will then look like:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :orders
end

class Order < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
end

You need a link between the two (order_id) otherwise they would have no knowledge of each other. This is known as a foreign key.

When things are set up this way, you can get the users by doing:

User.find(1).orders

And you can find the user information from an order by doing:

Orders.find(1).user

I hope this helps.

EDIT:

Orders.find(ORDER_ID).user.update_attributes(:billing_id => BILLING_ID)