Clone ActiveRecords

I am using the Marshal module to create a deep clone of an
ActiveRecord object hierarchy… i.e. an object that has_many
children, which at their turn may have many children, etc.

In model file of the root object I have the following method:

def deep_clone()

aClone = Marshal::load(Marshal.dump(self))

return aClone

end

This works fine, the returned clone contains the same has_many
hierarchy as the original…

However, it also copies the value of the “id” attribute for each of
the cloned objects in the hierarchy… if I were to save it (e.g.
aClone.save), I am effectively updating the same database record as the
original.

Question: what’s the best way to turn these cloned objects in the
hierarchy into a new ActiveRecords such that upon save of the root
object, the root and all it’s children in hierarchy get created as a set
of new records and the children of the cloned object correctly point to
their parents ?

Is it just a matter of setting the “@new_record” attribute to “true” for
each of the cloned objects in the hierarchy, after I called the clone
method ?

Thanks,

In the end I decided to write a custom routine to clone the hierarchy
of ActiveRecords and play it safe; I believe the above approach will
work, but since my hiearchy was only 3 levels deep and a few
attributes at each level, I played it safe and hand coded it.

On May 3, 1:05 am, Edwin M. [email protected]