I am trying to solve this problem regarding polymorphically related
objects. Consider this example, which i currently used in my
application:
user = User.find(1)
t = user.token
t.destroy
I am going to change the relationship between users and tokens to be
one-to-many because there are several cases that a user would have a
token created for them. In my applicaiton, some cases are account
verification, password reset, for example. I want to be able to use it
like this:
user = User.find(1)
email_t = user.email_token
pwd_t = user.password_token
The catch is that i need to be able to tell which token is which, so
that user.email_token returns the proper single token out of the
collection of tokens which are stored in the database table. Since these
tokens are related to security features, it is important that each is
properly identified. This would also provide a nice API on my
ActiveRecord object that i would use elsewhere once i have it, but on my
User model it is more pressing.
Has anyone else encountered this need? How did you address it? There are
a couple work arounds i can think of, but there is probably a better way
to do this than having fake/stub model classes or adding more columns to
the database. Currently my User model is pretty simple, and its table
does not have a “type” column. Much appreciated…
Greg