multi polymorphic relationship?

rubyonrails-talk
1

In my app, I want to let users mark various relationship between them and other users and objects. Example

john selects mary as favorite user john selects mary as featured user of the month john puts mary in bookmarks john selects "funny cat" as favorite picture john votes for "funny cat" as featured picture of the month john puts "funny cat" in bookmarks

I could have a bookmark model, a favorite model, and a feature model and use polymorphic association. But this seems like a lot of duplication.

acts_as_favorable acts_as_bookmarkable acts_as_featureable

I really just want to say something like

acts_as_markable :models => [:favorite,:bookmark,:feature]

u=User.find_ny_name('john') p=Picture.find 10 u.mark_favorite( p) u.mark_feature( p) u2 = User.find_by_name('mary') u.mark_bookmark( u2) u.marked_bookmark?( u2) # true u.marked_favorite_users # list of favorite users

Suggestions?

2

rubynuby wrote:

In my app, I want to let users mark various relationship between them and other users and objects.

I could have a bookmark model, a favorite model, and a feature model and use polymorphic association. But this seems like a lot of duplication.

acts_as_favorable acts_as_bookmarkable acts_as_featureable

I really just want to say something like

acts_as_markable :models => [:favorite,:bookmark,:feature]

What you want is the wonderful has_many_polymorphs => Evan Weaver

- Niels.

3

Thanks, I read the doc several times but I still don't get how I can use it in my case. It seems I still need a separate join model for favorite, bookmark, etc. ??

4

You may be able to use a combination of Single Table Inheritance and polymorphic associations. STI would handle distinguishing bookmarks from favorites from features, etc while allowing them all to share the 'mark' behavior. Polymporphic associations, as I think you already understood, would allow you to 'mark' an object of any type.