AliasAssociation

AliasAssociation is a Ruby on Rails concern that provides a simple way to create aliases for ActiveRecord associations, including both getter and setter methods.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'alias_association'

And then execute:

bundle install

Usage

Include the AliasAssociation concern in your ActiveRecord model and use the alias_association class method to create aliases for existing associations.

class Order < ApplicationRecord
  include AliasAssociation

  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :income_payment_system, class_name: 'PaymentSystem'
  belongs_to :outcome_payment_system, class_name: 'PaymentSystem'

  # Create aliases for associations
  alias_association :owner, :user
  alias_association :payment_system_from, :income_payment_system
  alias_association :payment_system_to, :outcome_payment_system
end

Now you can use the aliases just like the original associations:

order = Order.first

# Getter methods
order.owner        # equivalent to order.user
order.payment_system_from  # equivalent to order.income_payment_system
order.payment_system_to    # equivalent to order.outcome_payment_system

# Setter methods
order.owner = User.find(2)        # equivalent to order.user = User.find(2)
order.payment_system_from = ps    # equivalent to order.income_payment_system = ps
order.payment_system_to = ps      # equivalent to order.outcome_payment_system = ps

Error Handling

The concern validates that the original association exists before creating the alias:

class Order < ApplicationRecord
  include AliasRelationship

  # This will raise an ArgumentError if :nonexistent_association doesn't exist
  alias_association :alias_name, :nonexistent_association
  # => ArgumentError: Association :nonexistent_association not found

Debug Information

You can retrieve information about association aliases for debugging purposes:

Order.association_aliases
# => { owner: :user, payment_system_from: :income_payment_system, payment_system_to: :outcome_payment_system }

API Reference

alias_association(new_name, original_name)

Creates an alias for an existing ActiveRecord association.

• new_name (Symbol) - The name for the new alias
• original_name (Symbol) - The name of the existing association to alias

Raises: ArgumentError if the original association doesn't exist

association_aliases

Returns a hash containing information about all association aliases for the model.

Returns: Hash with alias names as keys and original association names as values

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/dapi/alias_association.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.