Many-to-Many: Simple vs Rich in Rails

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I have a question about these two relationships as I think I'm overthinking it and have confused myself quite a bit.

So they both involve a new table that sits in between the two tables you want to join.

A simple M2M gets the foreign keys from the other two tables (so example would be "blog_posts_categories" table would get the blog_post_id and the category_id foreign keys). Then for the associations, the blog_post and category models would have has_and_belongs_to_many associations with each other but the joined table gets no model.

for a rich M2M, a third joined table is created. This table gets the foreign key from the other two tables, and those two tables get the foreign key of the joined table. Then for the rails association, the joined DOES get a model, and it belongs_to the other two corresponding models. And those two models has_many of the joined table model

Am I anywhere near close to being right? I think my issue is that I keep conflating the table with the model or at least for the simple many-to-many since I keep expecting there should be a model to go along with the table.

Thanks for any direction that can be given.

asked 52 secs ago

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Many-to-Many: Simple vs Rich in Rails