Access other model attributes directly with has_one, belongs_to ?

rubyonrails-talk
1

So, I have 2 models A and B that share 5 common attributes and all other attributes are different. So I wanted to extract these 5 out into one common table and use has_one, belongs_to to knit it back together. So now there are 3 tables with 1 having the shared properties, we'll call this table C.

Table A id dollar_amount

Table B id quantity_on_hand

Table C id version

My question is, I want to access attributes from table C like they are in table A, such as:

@a = a.new a.version

and NOT a.c.version

Is my only option to use method_missing?

Anyone got any ideas?

2

I think what you’re looking for is “delegate” which is a rails extension to Module:

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Module.html#method-i-delegate

class ModelC < ActiveRecord::Base

has_many :model_a

end

class ModelA < ActiveRecord::Base

belongs_to :model_c

delegate :version, :to => :model_c

end

Then you can call version on a ModelA instance like you want to.

3

Thanks, I think that is what I'm looking for!