Find-all with polymorphic association?

Rails
1

I have this:

class Document < ActiveRecord::Base

belongs_to :documentable, :polymorphic => true

and this:

class Task < ActiveRecord::Base

has_many :documents, :as => :documentable

This, on Document, doesn’t work:

def self.find_all_by_documentable_id(id)
Document.find_all_by_documentable(id)
end

undefined method `find_all_by_documentable’ for Document:Class

I’ve spent hours googling on polymorphism and find, and everyone just
talks about how it just works. Only it doesn’t because find_all_by
isn’t defined for my polymorphic association. I guess I could do

.find(“documentable_type = ?, documentable_id = ?”…

but that just seems really crude. Any advice?

2

There is no documentable field defined on Document but
documentable_id, which means you don’t need to define your own method,
just call Document.find_all_by_documentable_id(some_id). Hope it
answers your question.

Val
http://revolutiononrails.blogspot.com/

3

Why is Documentable another model? Why is it not a column n the
Document table?

Zach I.
→ Blog — http://www.zachinglis.com
→ Company — http://www.lt3media.com
→ Portfolio — http://portfolio.zachinglis.com

4

There is a documentable field for most purposes eg I can do

d = Document.find(1)
p d.documentable

It seems odd that I don’t get find methods to go along with this. Is
that really the case?

5

You could do that without the extra documentable field.

class Document < ActiveRecord::Base

#update documentable to true
def documentable
update_attributes(:documentable => 1)
end

#update documentable to false
def not_documentable
update_attributes(:documentable => 0)
end

check to see if it’s true or false

def documentable?
case self.documentable
where 0
“is NOT documentable”
where 1
“is documentable”
end
end

Something like that. and only with a documentable field rather than a
polymorphic association which I could only presume would be heavier.

Zach I.
→ Blog — http://www.zachinglis.com
→ Company — http://www.lt3media.com
→ Portfolio — http://portfolio.zachinglis.com

6

It’s an association, so you don’t get find_all_by_documentable for the
same reason you don’t get find_all_by_normal_belongs_to_association.

In other words, given the class below, you don’t get find_all_by_foo.
You only get find_all_by_foo_id.

class Bar < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :foo
end