Retrieve all posts where the given user has commented, Ruby on Rails

I have users, posts and comments. User can post only one comment to each post.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :posts
  has_many :comments
end

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :comments
  belongs_to :user
end

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :post
end

On userpage (http://host/users/1 for example) I want to show all posts where the given user has commented. Each post then will have all other comments.

I can do something like this in my User controller:

def show
  @user = User.find(params[:user_id])
  @posts = []
  user.comments.each {|comment| @posts << comment.post}
end

This way I will find User, then all his comments, then corresponding post to each comment, and then (in my view) for each post I will render post.comments. I'm totally new in Rail开发者_JAVA百科s, so I can do this =) But I think it's somehow bad and there is a better way to do this, maybe I should use scopes or named_scopes (don't know yet what this is, but looks scary).

So can you point me out to the right direction here?

You could define an association which retrieves all the posts with comments in a single query. Keeping it in the model reduces the complexity of your controllers, enables you to reuse the association and makes it easier to unit test.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :posts_with_comments, :through => :comments, :source => :post
  # ...
end

:through is an option for has_many to specify a join table through which to perform the query. We need to specify the :source as Rails wouldn't be able to infer the source from :post_with_comments.

Lastly, update your controller to use the association.

def show
  @user  = User.find(params[:user_id])
  @posts = @user.posts_with_comments
end

To understand more about :through and :source take a look at the documentation.

When you got the user, you have the associations to his posts and each post has his comments. You could write: (I don't know the names of your table fields, so i named the text text)

# In Controller
@user = User.find(params[:user_id]).include([:posts, :comments])

# In View
@user.posts.each do |post|
  post.text
  # Comments to the Post
  post.comments.each do |comment|
    comment.text
  end
end

I haven't tested the code, so there could be some errors.