Module: BelongsToMany

Extended by:
Migrations
Included in:
ActiveRecord::Base
Defined in:
lib/vex/active_record/belongs_to_many.rb

Overview

belongs_to_many gives you a behaviour that you would typically (and for a reason) do via has_and_belongs_to_many or has_many. You would do this for performance reasons under a quite small set of circumstances:

  • your habtm code runs slow, because of the huge number of database transactions involved

  • you will never search by the associated data

In these cases belongs_to_many might help. It not only denormalizes the database structure, it uses a single text column in the host table to hold the referenced ids, and uses ActiveRecord’s read_attribute and write_attribute methods to automatically convert between IDs involved and actual objects.

belongs_to_many has a number of limitations over AR’ has_and_belongs_to_many and has_many associations:

  • it is not an association proxy: that means you cannot extend it, cannot search through it, etc.

  • The ‘<<’ operator is not allowed and throws an exceptions: As we wanted to stay pretty close to rails default behaviour we had to disable that method. Otherwise all performance gain would be lost anyways.

  • You cannot search via the associated data, because there is no easy way to join the associated tables.

  • There might be a bogus write when setting the column

ONCE MORE! THIS IS NOT A MORE PERFORMANT replacement for has_and_belongs_to_many or has_many!

Defined Under Namespace

Modules: ClassMethods, Migrations

Class Method Summary collapse

Methods included from Migrations

migrate

Class Method Details

.included(base) ⇒ Object 



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# File 'lib/vex/active_record/belongs_to_many.rb', line 32

def self.included(base)
  base.extend ClassMethods
end