How to assign a has_many/belongs_to relation properly in Rails ActiveRecord?

Question

I have a rails app with articles and author model. If I have an author and a post and want to indicate that the author should be the owner of the article, or that the articl

Answer 1

I'm assuming you mean author_one.articles << my_article rather than just author_one << my_article

One difference between the two is that

author_one.articles << my_article

will save the change to the database immediately. i.e. it will either create the record for my_article if it has not been saved before or it will update the existing record to have author_id = author_one.id

whereas

my_article.author = author_one

or

my_article.author_id = author_one.id

will not be persisted until you do a my_article.save