Description
I’d like to propose a feature that allows developers to mark Active Record associations as deprecated, triggering warnings whenever they are used.
Motivation
Currently, Rails provides ways to deprecate methods, but there is no built-in mechanism to deprecate associations. This would be useful for cases where:
- A model’s association is being phased out in favor of another relationship.
- Developers want to warn against legacy associations without immediately removing them.
- Large applications need a smoother migration path when refactoring models.
Proposed Solution
Introduce a association_deprecated: true option to association declarations, which would log deprecation warnings when the association is used.
Example:
class User < ApplicationRecord
has_many :posts, association_deprecated: true
end
user = User.first
user.posts # => Logs a deprecation warning
User.includes(:posts) # => Logs a deprecation warning
User.joins(:posts) # => Logs a deprecation warning
User.eager_load(:posts) # => Logs a deprecation warning
SomethingElse.joins(user: :posts) # => Logs a deprecation warning
The deprecation warning would be logged through Application.deprecator.warn, ensuring it follows Rails’ standard deprecation practices.
I have taken the first step of forking rails and writing code that should support this. But before i take this any further I wanted to get a feel for if this feature is something that aligns with Rails.
You can find my preliminary code changes here: GitHub - Tambiebarango/rails: Ruby on Rails
Thank you Theodore