search for: already_friend_of

I have a User model who HBTM Friends (class User). I would like to check for the existance of a user in the friends table before actually adding them (in case they were already added as a friend.) I have a method called already_friend_of?(friend) defined in my User model, but I am not sure how to define this method. I simply want to check to see if one user is already a friend of another user (I also use this method in my views to change the state of some links and buttons - for example, the ''add friend'' butto...

In my last post I was asking how I could check for the existance of a record before inserting a new one and this was the helper method that I was using to do this: def already_friend_of?(friend) begin self.friends.find(friend.id) true rescue false end end I was told that this is not very efficient, as it hits the db every time I call it. I completely agree and would like to do this in a more optimized way. I was told to create another method that reads all the...