unidirectional belongs_to polymorphic

rubyonrails-talk
1

The setup: class Location::Base < ActiveRecord::Base   set_table_name :locations   ... end class Location::Address < Location::Base   ... end class Location::Airport < Location::Base   ... end class Person < ActiveRecord::Base   belongs_to :location, :polymorphic => true, :class_name => "Location::Base"   ... end

I want a unidirectional belongs_to relationship. That is, Locations are never going to need to figure out who's at them. Or, more specifically, the headache involved with the many-to-many and the caching and everything isn't worth the cost. I just want to be able to store a location for a Person (and for various other models that are unrelated to Person).

Some questions:

Why does Person need both a location_id and a location_type? In order to instantiate the location, it needs to look up the whole row in the locations table, which includes a "type" column (as required by single table inheritance).

Why won't the new sexy fixtures work on this (regardless of whether Person has a location_type column)? They seem to work only if Location::Base has_one :person.

-Gaius

2

Right, so the answer is that uni-directional belongs_to associations *can't* be polymorphic. The polymorphicness of a belongs_to association is on the belonging-to side, not the belonged-side. That is, my Person doesn't inherit from some "Locatable."

This solves it: class Person < ActiveRecord::Base   belongs_to :location, :class_name => 'Location::Base' end

(I actually do abstract Locatable into a mixin module, but it's not an STI inheritance thing, so there's no AR polymorphism.)

-Gaius