SchemaAssociations

SchemaAssiciations is an ActiveRecord extension that keeps your model class definitions simpler and more DRY, by automatically defining associations based on the database schema.

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Overview

One of the great things about Rails (ActiveRecord, in particular) is that it inspects the database and automatically defines accessors for all your columns, keeping your model class definitions simple and DRY. That’s great for simple data columns, but where it falls down is when your table contains references to other tables: then the “accessors” you need are the associations defined using belongs_to, has_one, has_many, and has_and_belongs_to_many – and you need to put them into your model class definitions by hand. In fact, for every relation, you need to define two associations each listing its inverse, such as

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :comments, :inverse_of => :post
end

class Comment < ActiveReocrd::Base
    belongs_to :post, :inverse_of => :comments
end

.…which isn’t so DRY.

Enter the SchemaAssociations gem. It extends ActiveRecord to automatically define the appropriate associations based on foreign key constraints in the database. SchemaAssociations builds on the href="http://rubygems.org/gems/schema_plus"> gem that automatically defines foreign key constraints. So the common case is simple – if you have this in your migration:

create_table :posts do |t|
end

create_table :comments do |t|
  t.integer post_id
end

Then all you need for your models is:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
end

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
end

and SchemaAssociations defines the appropriate associations under the hood.

What if I want something special?

You’re always free to define associations yourself, if for example you want to pass special options. SchemaAssociations won’t clobber any existing definitions.

You can also control the behavior with various options, globally via SchemaAssociations::setup or per-model via SchemaAssociations::ActiveRecord#schema_associations, such as:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
    schema_associations :concise_names => false
end

See SchemaAssociations::Config for the available options.

This seems cool, but I’m worried about too much automagic

You can globally turn off automatic creation in config/initializers/schema_associations.rb:

SchemaAssociations.setup do |config|
  config.auto_create = false
end

Then in any model where you want automatic associations, just do

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  schema_associations
end

You can also pass options as per above.

Full Details

The basics

The common cases work entirely as you’d expect. For a one-to-many relationship using standard naming conventions:

# migration:

create_table :comments do |t|
    t.integer post_id
end

# schema_associations defines:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :comments
end

class Comment < ActiveReocrd::Base
    belongs_to :post
end

For a one-to-one relationship:

# migration:

create_table :comments do |t|
    t.integer post_id, :index => :unique    # (using the :index option provided by schema_plus )
end

# schema_associations defines:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_one :comment
end

class Comment < ActiveReocrd::Base
    belongs_to :post
end

And for many-to-many relationships:

# migration:

create_table :groups_members do |t|
    integer :group_id
    integer :member_id
end

# schema_associations defines:

class Group < ActiveReocrd::Base
    has_and_belongs_to_many :members
end

class Member < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_and_belongs_to_many :groups
end

Unusual names, multiple references

Sometimes you want or need to deviate from the simple naming conventions. In this case, the belongs_to relationship name is taken from the name of the foreign key column, and the has_many or has_one is named by the referencing table, suffixed with “as” the relationship name. An example should make this clear…

Suppose your company hires interns, and each intern is assigned a manager and a mentor, who are regular employees.

create_table :interns do |t|
    t.integer :manager_id,      :references => :employees
    t.integer :mentor_id,       :references => :employees
end

SchemaAssociations defines a belongs_to association for each reference, named according to the column:

class Intern < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to  :manager, :class_name => "Employee", :foreign_key => "manager_id"
    belongs_to  :mentor,  :class_name => "Employee", :foreign_key => "mentor_id"
end

And the corresponding has_many association each gets a suffix to indicate which one relation it refers to:

class Employee < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :interns_as_manager, :class_name => "Intern", :foreign_key => "manager_id"
    has_many :interns_as_mentor,  :class_name => "Intern", :foreign_key => "mentor_id"
end

Special case for trees

If your forward relation is named “parent”, SchemaAssociations names the reverse relation “child” or “children”. That is, if you have:

create_table :nodes
   t.integer :parent_id         # schema_plus assumes it's a reference to this table
end

Then SchemaAssociations will define

class Node < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :parent, :class_name => "Node", :foreign_key => "parent_id"
    has_many :children, :class_name => "Node", :foreign_key => "parent_id"
end

Concise names

For modularity in your tables and classes, you might use a common prefix for related objects. For example, you may have widgets each of which has a color, and might have one base that has a top color and a bottom color, from the same set of colors.

create_table :widget_colors |t|
end

create_table :widgets do |t|
    t.integer   :widget_color_id
end

create_table :widget_base
    t.integer :widget_id, :index => :unique
    t.integer :top_widget_color_id,    :references => :widget_colors
    t.integer :bottom_widget_color_id, :references => :widget_colors
end

Using the full name for the associations would make your code verbose and not quite DRY:

@widget.widget_color
@widget.widget_base.top_widget_color

Instead, by default, SchemaAssociations uses concise names: shared leading words are removed from the association name. So instead of the above, your code looks like:

@widget.color
@widget.base.top_color

i.e. these associations would be defined:

class WidgetColor < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :widgets,         :class_name => "Widget",     :foreign_key => "widget_color_id"
    has_many :bases_as_top,    :class_name => "WidgetBase", :foreign_key => "top_widget_color_id"
    has_many :bases_as_bottom, :class_name => "WidgetBase", :foreign_key => "bottom_widget_color_id"
end

class Widget < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :color, :class_name => "WidgetColor", :foreign_key => "widget_color_id"
    has_one    :base,  :class_name => "WidgetBase",  :foreign_key => "widget_base_id"
end

class WidgetBase < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :top_color,    :class_name => "WidgetColor", :foreign_key => "top_widget_color_id"
    belongs_to :bottom_color, :class_name => "WidgetColor", :foreign_key => "bottom_widget_color_id"
    belongs_to :widget,       :class_name => "Widget",      :foreign_key => "widget_id"
end

If you like the formality of using full names for the asociations, you can turn off concise names globally or per-model, see SchemaAssociations::Config

Ordering has_many using position

If the target of a has_many association has a column named position, SchemaAssociation will specify :order => :position for the association. That is,

create_table :comments do |t|
    t.integer post_id
    t.integer position
end

leads to

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :comments, :order => :position
end

How do I know what it did?

If you’re curious (or dubious) about what associations SchemaAssociations defines, you can check the log file. For every assocation that SchemaAssociations defines, it generates an info entry such as

[schema_associations] Post.has_many :comments, :class_name "Comment", :foreign_key "comment_id"

which shows the exact method definition call.

SchemaAssociations defines the associations lazily, only creating them when they’re first needed. So you may need to search through the log file to find them all (and some may not be defined at all if they were never needed for the use cases that you logged).

Compatibility

SchemaAssociations supports all combinations of:

• rails 3.2

• MRI ruby 1.9.2 or 1.9.3

Note: As of version 1.0.0, ruby 1.8.7 and rails < 3.2 are no longer supported. The last version to support them is 0.1.2

Installation

Install from rubygems.org via

$ gem install "schema_associations"

or in a Gemfile

gem "schema_associations"

Testing

SchemaAssociations is tested using rspec, sqlite3, and rvm, with some hackery to test against multiple versions of rails and ruby. To run the full combo of tests, after you’ve forked & cloned:

$ cd schema_associations
$ ./runspecs --install  # do this once to install gem dependencies for all versions (slow)
$ ./runspecs # as many times as you like

See ./runspecs --help for more options. In particular, to run rspec on a specific file or example (rather than running the full suite) you can do, e.g.

$ ./runspecs [other options] --rspec -- spec/association_spec.rb -e 'base'

If you’re running ruby 1.9, code coverage results will be in coverage/index.html – it should be at 100% coverage.

Release notes:

1.0.1

• Bug fix: use singular :inverse_of for :belongs_to of a :has_one

1.0.0

• Use :inverse_of in generated associations

• Drop support for ruby 1.8.7 and rails < 3.2

History

• SchemaAssociations is derived from the “Red Hill On Rails” plugin foreign_key_associations originally created by harukizaemon (github.com/harukizaemon)

• SchemaAssociations was created in 2011 by Michal Lomnicki and Ronen Barzel

License

This gem is released under the MIT license.