Migrating from Rails HABTM to has_many :through

I had a has_and_belongs_to_many (HABTM) association that I needed to convert to has_many through with an explicit model that contains additional columns.

 In my example a User knows about many Words and each Word is known by many Users.

You can find many pages on the web about the differences. The consensus is that has_many :through is the way to go from the start - and after this process I agree.

Making the change in itself is not a big deal - drop the existing joining table 'users_words', create the new one, update the User and Word models and you're good to go.

Problem is that I already had data in the joining table...

And because the standard way of setting up a HABTM joining table does not include an id column, you can't just use that table or directly copy each record from it. Dang it...

Here were my steps - hopefully I got them all - don't skip any !

1: Backup your database and prevent users from accessing it

2: Do not touch any of the old associations, table, etc

3: Create the new table and model with a different name from the old joining table.
My HABTM table was users_words and my new table is user_work_links

4: Update the two models
My original association was this - do not change it yet !

  has_and_belongs_to_many :words, :uniq => true

The new association is this - NOTE the second line is commented out for now - VERY important !

  has_many :user_word_links, :dependent => :destroy
  # has_many :words, :through => :user_word_links, :uniq => true

5: Copy over the data from the old joining table with a rake task
You need to go through the existing associations one by one to get the ids for records in the two tables.
Here is my script:

namespace :craic do
  desc "move user word data"
  task :move_user_word_data => :environment  do
    users = User.all
    users.each do |user|
      user.words.each do |word|
        record = UserWordLink.new({ :user_id => user.id, :word_id => word.id })
        record.save
      end
    end
  end
end

6: Update the two models
Now you can comment out the old associations and uncomment the new ones

  # has_and_belongs_to_many :words, :uniq => true
  has_many :user_word_links, :dependent => :destroy
  has_many :words, :through => :user_word_links, :uniq => true

In the attr_accessible lists in the two models be sure to add :user_ids in the Word model and :word_ids in the User model. If your forget this it will silently fail to create the records

7: Test Test Test
You should be back up and running with the new model

8: Remove the old table
Finally create a migration that drops the old table and run it

Not too bad as long as you think it through before you start and don't rush the steps