RailsDynamicAssociations

Define your model associations in the database without changing the schema or models.

Features

• Creates associations for your models when application starts.
• Provides Relation & Role models.
• No configuration code needed.
• No code generated or inserted to your app (except migrations).
• Adds some useful methods to ActiveRecord objects to handle their relations.

Installation

1. Add the gem to your Gemfile and bundle it.
2. Copy migrations to your app (rake rails_dynamic_associations:install:migrations).
3. Migrate the DB (rake db:migrate).

Usage

Add configuration records to the DB:

    Relation.create({
        source_type: Person,
        target_type: Book,
    })

Or use a helper method:

    Relation.seed Person, Book

Now you have:

    person.books
    book.people

Roles

You can create multiple role-based associations between two models.

    Relation.seed Person, Book, %w[
        author
        editor
    ]

You will get:

    person.books
    person.authored_books
    person.edited_books

    book.people
    book.author_people
    book.editor_people

Special cases

In case you have set up relations with a User model you'll get a slightly different naming:

    Relation.seed User, Book, %w[
        author
        editor
    ]

    book.users
    book.authors
    book.editors

The list of models to be handled this way can be set with actor_model_names configuration parameter. It includes User by default.

TODO

• Describe self-referential associations.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request