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What advantages and disadvantages do you know of Ruby on Rails polymorphic relationships.
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Polymorphic relationship in Rails refers to a type of Active Record association. This concept is used to attach a model to another model that can be of a different type by only having to define one association.
Polymorphism is an important concept in object-oriented programming. It allows us to implement many different implementations of the same method, helping with code reusability and avoiding redundancy. In Ruby, we can implement polymorphism using inheritance or duck typing.
In Single-Table Inheritance (STI), many subclasses inherit from one superclass with all the data in the same table in the database. The superclass has a “type” column to determine which subclass an object belongs to. In a polymorphic association, one model “belongs to” several other models using a single association.
Single Table Inheritance (STI) models are defined as separate classes inheriting from one base class, but they aren't associated with separate tables — they share one database table. The table contains a type column that defines which subclass an object belongs to.
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
I'm a big fan of using relationships of this sort for records that are attached to a large number of things as required, for example, a comment or annotation record which may apply to a wide variety of records.
It is not very well suited for situations where the relationship is exercised in a JOIN frequently. That is, the polymorphic association should not be in the middle of a relationship between records, but as something on the perimeter.
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