Metabolical

Metabolical is an ActiveRecord Model & mixin that adds metadata to your AR classes. Whenever you feel like adding a column to a table ask yourself if what you really want is just some metadata.

Install

gem install metabolical

Usage

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  metabolize!
end

user = User.new
user.metas['active'] = true
user.metas['active'].data #=> true

User.with_meta('active') #=> all users with some metadata keyed as 'active'
User.with_meta_data('active', true) #=> all user with metadata with key 'active' and set to true
User.without_meta('asshole') #=> all users that don't have a metadata keyed as 'asshole'.

Notes

Metabolical will need you to run the following migration

create_table :meta_data, :force => true do |t|
  t.integer :metabolized_id
  t.string  :metabolized_type
  t.string  :key
  t.text    :data
  t.timestamps
end

add_index :meta_data, [:metabolized_id, :metabolized_type, :key]