Rails relies on some of the neat aspects of Ruby. One of those is the ability to respond to an undefined method.

Consider a relationship between Dog and Owner. Owner has_many :dogs and Dog belongs_to :owner.

If you go into script/console, get a dog object with fido = Dog.find(1), and look at that object, you won't see a method or attribute called Owner.

What you will see is an owner_id. And if you ask for fido.owner, the object will do something like this (at least, this is how it appears to me):

1. I'm being asked for my .owner attribute. I don't have one of those!
2. Before I throw a NoMethodError, do I have a rule about how to deal with this?
3. Yes, I do: I should check and see if I have an owner_id.
4. I do! OK, then I'll do a join and return that owner object.

PHP's documentation is - ahem - a bit lacking sometimes, so I wonder if anyone here knows the answer to this: Can I define similar behavior for objects in PHP? If not, do you know of a workaround for flexible model joins like these?