To start off, I don't know if this is unorthodox, or if someone has had to implement something similar. I've searched all over Google and don't really a see a good solution for what I'm trying to do.
Basically I created my own plugin that subclasses ActiveResource so that I can consume non-REST URIs and get back XML. That's easy, there are lots of exmaples online of how to do that. Basically, I then use a gem called happymapper to bind the XML to Ruby objects. Again, this works very easily as well. Now here's where I'm stuck. I want to persist the Ruby object to a local database so that I don't have to go out and get it again. I had a thought of using the save method from ActiveRecord since all the DB plumbing is built in, but I'm a little bit at a loss as to how I can call ActiveRecords's save method from a subclass of ActiveResource as Ruby doesn't allow multiple inheritance.
Has anyone else needed to use ActiveResource to extract data, and then come up with a method to persist that data to a local DB? Using the ActiveResource save method will attempt to POST it back to the place where I got it, and it's a read-only resource.
Thanks for your help everyone!
David