Using Reflections to find out ActiveRecord class association

Rails
1

I want to find out what are the associations with another active record
class. So If my class is as below:

Class Component < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :branches
end

class Branch < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :component
end

and then I do

Component.reflections[:branches].active_record

I would expect that to be Branch but it is in fact Component.

The inspection of Component.reflections is as below

{:branches=>#<ActiveRecord::Reflection::AssociationReflection:0x37d86d8
@active_record=Component, @primary_key_name=“component_id”, @options={},
@name=:branches, @macro=:has_many>

How can I get what class the has_many is to?

I am using Rails 1.1/Ruby 1.8.2

Thanks,

Steve T.

2

Steve T. wrote:

I want to find out what are the associations with another active record
class. So If my class is as below:

Class Component < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :branches
end

class Branch < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :component
end

and then I do

Component.reflections[:branches].active_record

I would expect that to be Branch but it is in fact Component.

The inspection of Component.reflections is as below

{:branches=>#<ActiveRecord::Reflection::AssociationReflection:0x37d86d8
@active_record=Component, @primary_key_name=“component_id”, @options={},
@name=:branches, @macro=:has_many>

How can I get what class the has_many is to?

Component.reflect_on_association(:branches).klass

Don’t use the reflections[] attribute. It contains both associations and
aggregations, so you might get the wrong thing. Use the API. And
reflect_on_all_associations() returns a list of all the class’s
associations, so you can find out what they all are that way.

–
Josh S.
http://blog.hasmanythrough.com

3

Josh S. wrote:

How can I get what class the has_many is to?

Component.reflect_on_association(:branches).klass

Don’t use the reflections[] attribute. It contains both associations and
aggregations, so you might get the wrong thing. Use the API. And
reflect_on_all_associations() returns a list of all the class’s
associations, so you can find out what they all are that way.

Thanks that worked just like I wanted.

Steve T.