convert between two AssociationProxies

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello

There's a polymorphic association Person -> Adult. There's an AssociationProxy array of Adult, how to convert this proxy of Person to corresponding AssociationProxy of Adult?

Thanks

2

Normally you operate (iterate) over one of the proxies since it's job really is to give you a collection (array) of model instances.

Can you give a more concrete example of what you're trying to accomplish?

3

Let me give you another example, there's a model Thing that has polymorphic association with GoodThing and BadThing. Thing also has many-to-many association with itself: Thing can have many owners and many properties among other Things.

class Relation < ActiveRecord::Base   belongs_to :owner, :class_name => 'Thing', :foreign_key => :owner_id   belongs_to :property, :class_name => 'Thing', :foreign_key => :property_id end

class Thing < ActiveRecord::Base   belongs_to :instance, :polymorphic => true

  has_many :relations_to, :class_name => 'Relation', :foreign_key => :owner_id   has_many :relations_from, :class_name => 'Relation', :foreign_key => :property_id

  has_many :properties, :through => :relations_to   has_many :owners, :through => :relations_from end

class GoodThing < ActiveRecord::Base   has_one :thing, :as => :instance end

class BadThing < ActiveRecord::Base   has_one :thing, :as => :instance end

I want to perform operation like:

new_good = GoodThing.new some_thing.properties.good_things << new_good

new_bad = BadThings.new some_thing.owners.bad_things << new_bad

some_thing.owners.find :all, :condition => {...}

or even

some_[good | bad]_thing.[owners | properties] << another_thing

I found out that there is a nice plugin has_finder:

http://pivots.pivotallabs.com/users/nick/blog/articles/284-hasfinder-it-s-now-easier-than-ever-to-create-complex-re-usable-sql-queries

so I can add to Thing

class Thing   has_finder :bad_things, :conditions => { :instance_type => 'BadThing' }   has_finder :good_things, :conditions => { :instance_type => 'GoodThing' } end

and write something like

some_thing.owners.bad_things << new_thing

The problem is that these AssociationProxies (Thing.bad_things, Thing.good_things) contain objects of class Thing, not BadThing or GoodThing and I need to do something like

new_good_thing = GoodThing.new new_thing = Thing.new new_thing.instance = new_good_thing

some_thing.owners << new_thing

And I wanna operate directly with an AssociationProxy of BadThing or GoodThings...

something like that)) i hope you can get what i mean

Thanks

4

Sounds like you might have a much simpler data model if you use a polymorphic association. This will allow you to have a relationship to many other properties without regard to what class they are. The only attribute that you care about is their relationship.

class Property < AR::Base   # This is done for relationships back to this class   has_one :property_relationship, :as=>:subproperty

  has_many :property_relationships

has_many :good_properties, :through=>:property_relationships, :conditions=>{:subproperty_type=>GoodProperty.name}

has_many :bad_properties, :through=>:property_relationships, :conditions=>{:subproperty_type=>BadProperty.name}

has_many :super_properties, :through=>:property_relationships, :conditions=>{:subproperty_type=>Property.name} end

class PropertyRelationship < AR::Base   belongs_to :property   belongs_to :subproperty, :polymorphic => true end

class GoodSubproperty < AR::Base   has_one :property_relationship, :as=>:subproperty end

class BadSubproperty << AR::Base   has_one :property_relationship, :as=>:subproperty end

5

i dont want to create any relationships with Property, but between two Subproperties, like some Subproperty can own many others and be owned by many others: :property -> :owner, :subproperty -> :possession

6

Actually what i want is to connect several models with many-to-many owner/property relationships, there should be only one model Relationship that holds all the relations, with following columns:

owner_id owner_type property_id property_type created_on etc

and i want to easy access to all owners/properties with specific type of some object:

an_instance_of_one_model.all_owners_of_this_instance_but_from_another_model << new_instance_of_that_another_model

Thanks