Ruby on Rails: attr_accessor for submodels

Posted by williamjones on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by williamjones
Published on 2010-04-09T20:30:26Z Indexed on 2010/04/09 20:33 UTC
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I'm working with some models where a lot of a given model's key attributes are actually stored in a submodel.

Example:

class WikiArticle
  has_many :revisions
  has_one :current_revision, :class_name => "Revision", :order => "created_at DESC"
end
class Revision
  has_one :wiki_article
end

The Revision class has a ton of database fields, and the WikiArticle has very few. However, I often have to access a Revision's fields from the context of a WikiArticle. The most important case of this is probably on creating an article. I've been doing that with lots of methods that look like this, one for each field:

def description
  if @description
    @description
  elsif current_revision
    current_revision.description
  else
    ""
  end  
end
def description=(string)
  @description = string
end

And then on my save, I save @description into a new revision.

This whole thing reminds me a lot of attr_accessor, only it doesn't seem like I can get attr_accessor to do what I need. How can I define an attr_submodel_accessor such that I could just give field names and have it automatically create all those methods the way attr_accessor does?

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