How to handle Belongs To User relationship

Question

In a custom plugin is it possible to have a element type with a belongs to relationship to a user, as you can only define half of the relationship (without somehow modifying the userRecord).

What would be the best practices to get something like this working?

Answer 1

Assuming your plugin is going to be the only thing referencing this Active Record relationship, your plugin could have its own MyUserRecord that extends Craft's UserRecord and does something like:

public function defineRelations()
{
    $relations = parent::defineRelations();

    $relations['myUser'] = array(static::BELONGS_TO, 'MyUserRecord', 'id', 'required' => true, 'onDelete' => static::CASCADE);

    return $relations;
}

And you would just utilize MyUserRecord instead of Craft's UserRecord in your plugin.