Belongs_to :through?

Rails
1

Suppose I have a belongs_to relationship and the thing it belongs to,
belongs in turn to something else.

For example, I would like to do:

belongs_to :city
belongs_to: :county, :through => :city

While it is not too much trouble to do obj.city.county, there are times
when I need to iterate through the attributes and include this
second-order attribute. Special code to handle this messes up my nice,
clean iteration.

How have others accomplished this?

Steven

2

Steven Talcott S. wrote:

Suppose I have a belongs_to relationship and the thing it belongs to,
belongs in turn to something else.

For example, I would like to do:

belongs_to :city
belongs_to: :county, :through => :city

While it is not too much trouble to do obj.city.county, there are times
when I need to iterate through the attributes and include this
second-order attribute. Special code to handle this messes up my nice,
clean iteration.

How have others accomplished this?

Steven

I wish this would be added to Core. I do the same thing all the time.

For now…

Class YourObj
def county
city.county
end
end

3

Yeah, I recently started playing around with has_many :through and was
surprised that belongs_to :through doesn’t exist. Seems like it should.

Joe

4

BTW, anybody file a request ticket? Looks like dev.rubyonrails.org is
still having problems…

Joe

5

On 7/23/06, Joe [email protected] wrote:

Yeah, I recently started playing around with has_many :through and was
surprised that belongs_to :through doesn’t exist. Seems like it should.

Joe

has_one :through, yes. belongs_to :through, no. I’ll see about
getting it in for the next rails release, but I’ve been pretty busy
and I personally haven’t needed it. Course if someone wants to step
up to the challenge I’ll be more then happy to review a patch and
commit if it’s good.

6

Rick O. wrote:

On 7/23/06, Joe [email protected] wrote:

Yeah, I recently started playing around with has_many :through and was
surprised that belongs_to :through doesn’t exist. Seems like it should.

Joe

has_one :through, yes. belongs_to :through, no. I’ll see about
getting it in for the next rails release, but I’ve been pretty busy
and I personally haven’t needed it. Course if someone wants to step
up to the challenge I’ll be more then happy to review a patch and
commit if it’s good.

Hey Rick,

Why no for belongs_to :through? I’m currently working on an app where it
seems like it’d make sense, but perhaps I need enlightening ;).

Joe

7

Hey Rick,

Why no for belongs_to :through? I’m currently working on an app where it
seems like it’d make sense, but perhaps I need enlightening ;).

Joe

Because belongs_to is for a foreign key thats in the current table.
If you’re going :through a model, it’s not the same and has_one should
be used.

8

I wrote a some connected_to code that does:

Say you have a model called TrainingItem that belongs_to a
:calendar_item

You can call TrainingItem connected_to :calendar_item, :date, which will
make @training_item.date work like @training_item.calendar_item.date.

It’s code that I slapped into my model, rather than pluginising, and it
doesn’t add itself to reflects_on_all_associations, but it works (rather
crudely) for me.

This is the code:

def self.connected_to(external, field, external_class = external)
external_model = external.camelcase
column field, external_model.to_c.columns.find{|x| x.name ==
field.to_s }.type
getter_method = <<-END_GETTER
def #{field}
return self.#{external}.#{field} if self.#{external}
end
END_GETTER
setter_method = <<-END_SETTER
def #{field}=(to_set)
if self.#{external}
self.#{external}.update_attribute(:#{field}, to_set)
else
self.#{external} = #{external_model}.create(:#{field} => to_set)
end
end
END_SETTER
def
self.send(field) rescue nil
end
def []=(field, to_set)
eval(“self.#{field} = to_set”)
end
self.module_eval(getter_method)
self.module_eval(setter_method)
end

Note: .to_c is a custom method I defined that basically does
Object.const_get(self) return nil (if I recall correctly).

9

On Monday, July 24, 2006, at 9:49 AM, Yehuda K. wrote:

crudely) for me.
end
def
Object.const_get(self) return nil (if I recall correctly).

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Can’t you already do this?

class Item < AR:Base
has_many :widgets
delegate :thingees, :widgets

def contents
self.thingees # returns self.widgets.thingees
end
end

_Kevin
www.sciwerks.com