Question

Let’s say I’m writing a Library application for a publishing company who already has a People application.

So in my Library application I have

class Person < ActiveResource::Base
  self.site = "http://api.people.mypublisher.com/"
end

and now I want to store Articles for each Person:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :person, :as => :author
end

I imagine I’d have the following table in my database:

Articles
id (PK) | title (string) | body (text) | author_id (integer)

author_id isn’t exactly a Foreign-Key, since I don’t have a People table. That leaves several questions:

1. how do I tell my Person ActiveResource object that it has_many Articles?

2. Will Articles.find(:first).author work? Will belongs_to even work given that there’s no ActiveRecord and no backing table?

Answer 1

As you point out, you are giving up a lot because ActiveResource does not have associations in the sense that ActiveRecord does.

You have already found the answer to question #1. As for question #2, your ActiveRecord model Article should behave just fine when configured with a “belongs_to” association to an ActiveResource model. That is Aritcle.find(:first).author should return the person object you want.