Multi-association using STI is not working

Question

I have Employee model and TicketStatus model using STI approach on Employee model in order to have to child models 'Advisor' and 'Staff', inside my TicketStatus i am trying to achieve the following: making a relation between TicketStatus and Advisor , TicketStatus and Staff, then TicketStatus and PreviousAdvisor , TicketStatus and PreviousStaff, my code is like this:

class TicketStatus < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :status_id, :ticket_id , :staff_id, :advisor_id, :previous_advisor_id, :previous_staff_id
  belongs_to :status
  belongs_to :ticket
  belongs_to :staff, class_name: 'Staff', foreign_key: 'staff_id'
  belongs_to :previous_staff , class_name: 'Staff', foreign_key: 'previous_staff_id'
  belongs_to :advisor, class_name: 'Advisor', foreign_key: 'advisor_id'
  belongs_to :previous_advisor, class_name: 'Advisor', foreign_key: 'previous_advisor_id'
end

the problem is i cannot have two association on the same class name , after generating a dependency diagram using rubymine i found that the second association is overwriting the first association , what can i do in order to make those association works correctly ?

Answer 1

This is happening because the foreign keys are the same. You can specify what the foreign keys should be for the second relationship in both cases like this:

belongs_to :previous_staff , class_name: 'Staff', foreign_key: 'previous_staff_id'

belongs_to :previous_advisor, class_name: 'Advisor', foreign_key: 'previous_advisor_id'

That'll preserve the separate relationships. The staff and the advisor relationships are fine.

EDIT: This was answered after the considerable edit of the question.