Player != Player?

Rails
1

I’m developing an hobby application designed to provide some utilities
for a favorite boardgame of mine. I can’t say exactly what problem I’m
having, but I can describe two symptoms that I’ve discovered have the
same root:

1.) When loading a page for the second time since the server started,
@player.technologies turns up method_missing (Player.has_many
:technologies)

2.) When loading a page for the second time since the server started,
@game.players << Player.new() raises an AssocationTypeMismatch
complaining that “Player expected, got Player”. Huh?

While investigating the first I discovered that on the second page
load since the server started, @player.reflect_on_all_associations.size
== 0. But on the first page load, there were 6! So somehow it “lost” my
associations. I did a sanity check. Yep, on the second page load
Player.reflections.size == 6 but @player.class.reflections == 0 … yet
@player.class.to_s == ‘Player’. Wow. So confused.

Well further digging revealed that on the second page load
@player.class != Player even though @player.class.to_s == Player.to_s.
Huh? That’s the same problem as issue #2.

Ok, so now at least I know the problems have the same root cause. I did
a lot more tracing through ActiveRecord. Stayed up a few hours. Whipped
myself with a wet noodle. Ended up putting some debugging messages into
ActiveRecord::Reflection::AssocationReflection.klass. Whenever that
method gets called, if self == Game I do some sanity checks to see if
@klass == Player.

class AssociationReflection < MacroReflection #:nodoc:
  def klass
    if active_record.to_s == 'Game'
      puts 'Player == compute type: ' + (Player ==

active_record.send(:compute_type, class_name)).to_s
puts 'Player == @klass: ’ + (Player == @klass).to_s if @klass
end
@klass ||= active_record.send(:compute_type, class_name)
end
…
end

On the first page load, both sanity checks return true. On the second
page load, the first returns true and the second returns false. That
is, on the first page load @klass == Player, but on the second page
load @klass != Player (even though @klass.to_s == ‘Player’ all the way
through).

What’s up? Anyone? Do I need a bigger noodle?