Matt,

Thank you very much for this explanation!

I have actually read the official Rails documentation:

Module ActiveRecord::Associations::ClassMethods

a  couple of times, and I did not find it mentioned
anywhere the equivalent of:

> there's a field owner_id on the model declaring the belongs_to

Field names are not mentioned in the official documentation, or I
missed it.

The below  is the closest thing to identifying the use of a field
in an association, again from the official documentation:

belongs_to :author, :class_name => "Person", :foreign_key =>
"author_id"

>From the above I believe I can infer the symbol :author is being
interpreted to
the field 'author_id'.  That still is not all that clear in my mind.
If you have an
overall understanding of the complete process it is sufficient. But
for me the
whole purpose of documentation is to provide a lucid description that
stands
on its own: you do not have to have a general knowledge in order to
understand
the documentation. So I feel the official Rails documentation should
be
improved also :)

Anyway, your explanation has finally resolved this missing bit of
information for
me and I appreciate it.

Cheers,

   Jet


> > I have had difficulty with this a number of times ...
> > belongs_to :owner, :class_name => "User"


> There isn't an Owner class in this instance - that's what  
> the :class_name option tells Rails. The declaration above implies that  
> there's a field owner_id on the model declaring the belongs_to, and  
> that owner_id is a foreign key to the 'users' table (OK, technically a  
> foreign key to the table specified in User.table_name).
>
> I'd also recommend reading over the Rails docs for belongs_to and  
> friends - they are actually pretty helpful.
>
> --Matt Jones
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