object cloning with relations

rubyonrails-talk
1

hello, i have a problem with cloning objects. the cloning of the objects is not really a problem. i can do that like this:

def ActiveRecord::Base.clone(country_id)   cloneObj = self.find(:first, :conditions => "country_id = 1")   newObj = self.new   newObj.save   newObj = cloneObj.dup   newObj.country_id = country_id   newObj.save end

the problem is that i would like to generalize the cloning of the has_and_belongs_to_many relations, too.

so instead of doing:

cloneObj.collection.each do |foo|   newObj.collection << foo end

in each and every model that has collections i would rather do that on an abstract level, too.

so i think my question is: is there a way to find out if the class has has_many_and_belongs_to_many relations? and if so is there a way to use that to assign the collections to the "cloned" objects as a general extension of ActiveRecord::Base, like the clone method above?

thanks for looking into that :slight_smile:

kind regards, alexander