Polymorphic association with single model as target

Hi,

I’m new to rails/ruby and not a sw programmer in the first place.

I’d like to use polymorphic associations to create tags/marks into
several dictionary tables (i.e japanese to english and japanese to
french) that share the same model. In that model I introduced a :target
field to select the database in a find query, i.e:

def self.find(*args)
for i in args
if i.class == Hash then
#i.each { |key, value| logger.info “#{key} is #{value}”}
target = i.delete :target
end
end
… process table name base on target and call set_table_name
super
end

The model that contain the marks to the dictionary entries is defined
like this:
belongs_to :ref, :polymorphic => true

I use the ref_id as foreign key (as in all the examples) and ref_type as
INTEGER with a number defining the dictionary I’d like to refer too.

Doing the “joins” myself as in the exemple below works well.

@marks_en = DbDict.find(:all,
           :target => DBDICT_EN_TYPE,
           :joins => "as db inner join marks as ma on ma.ref_id = 

db.id",
:conditions => "ma.ref_type = " + DBDICT_EN_TYPE.to_s)

Doing a call to something like:

@mark = Mark.find(params[:id]).ref

Does not work. I clearly understand that this will not work out of the
box, what I would like to know is how and where do I have to override
the “ref” method to get this to work ?
Is that possible at all or am I trying to force something that’s not
intended to be done this way ?

Any ideas highly appreciated!

Thanks
StefanS