Bi-directional polymorphic join model in Rails?

Question

I'm working on a multi-site CMS that has a notion of cross-publication among sites. Several types of content (Articles, Events, Bios, etc) can be associated with many Sites and Sites can have many pieces of content. The many-to-many association between content pieces and sites must also support a couple common attributes for each content item associated -- the notion of site origination (is this the original site upon which the content appeared?) as well as a notion of "primary" and "secondary" content status for a given piece of content on a given associated site.

My idea has been to create a polymorphic join model called ContentAssociation, but I'm having trouble getting the polymorphic associations to behave as I expect them to, and I'm wondering if perhaps I'm going about this all wrong.

Here's my setup for the join table and the models:

create_table "content_associations", :force => true do |t|
  t.string   "associable_type"
  t.integer  "associable_id"
  t.integer  "site_id"
  t.boolean  "primary_eligible"
  t.boolean  "secondary_eligible"
  t.boolean  "originating_site"
  t.datetime "created_at"
  t.datetime "updated_at"
end

class ContentAssociation < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :site
  belongs_to :associable, :polymorphic => true
  belongs_to :primary_site, :class_name => "Site", :foreign_key => "site_id" 
  belongs_to :secondary_site, :class_name => "Site", :foreign_key => "site_id"
  belongs_to :originating_site, :class_name => "Site", :foreign_key => "site_id"
end

class Site < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :content_associations, :dependent => :destroy 
  has_many :articles, :through => :content_associations, :source => :associable, :source_type => "Article"
  has_many :events, :through => :content_associations, :source => :associable, :source_type => "Event"

  has_many :primary_articles, :through => :content_associations, 
                              :source => :associable, 
                              :source_type => "Article", 
                              :conditions => ["content_associations.primary_eligible = ?" true]

  has_many :originating_articles, :through => :content_associations, 
                                  :source => :associable, 
                                  :source_type => "Article", 
                                  :conditions => ["content_associations.originating_site = ?" true]

  has_many :secondary_articles, :through => :content_associations, 
                                :source => :associable, 
                                :source_type => "Article", 
                                :conditions => ["content_associations.secondary_eligible = ?" true]
end

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :content_associations, :as => :associable, :dependent => :destroy
  has_one :originating_site, :through => :content_associations, 
                             :source => :associable, 
                             :conditions => ["content_associations.originating_site = ?" true]

  has_many :primary_sites, :through => :content_associations, 
                           :source => :associable
                           :conditions => ["content_associations.primary_eligible = ?" true]

  has_many :secondary_sites, :through => :content_associations, 
                             :source => :associable
                             :conditions => ["content_associations.secondary_eligible = ?" true]                         
end

I've tried a lot of variations of the above association declarations, but no matter what I do, I can't seem to get the behavior I want

@site = Site.find(2)
@article = Article.find(23)
@article.originating_site = @site
@site.originating_articles #=>[@article]

or this

@site.primary_articles << @article
@article.primary_sites #=> [@site]

Is Rails' built-in polymorphism the wrong mechanism to use to affect these connections between Sites and their various pieces of content? It seems like it would be useful because of the fact that I need to connect multiple different models to a single common model in a many-to-many way, but I've had a hard time finding any examples using it in this manner.

Perhaps part of the complexity is that I need the association in both directions -- i.e. to see all the Sites that a given Article is associated with and see all of the Articles associated with a given Site. I've heard of the plugin has_many_polymorphs, and it looks like it might solve my problems. But I'm trying to use Rails 3 here and not sure that it's supported yet.

Any help is greatly appreciated -- even if it just sheds more light on my imperfect understanding of the uses of polymorphism in this context.

thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you need the associations to be more extensible than STI would allow, you can try writing your own collection helpers that do extra type-introspection.

Any time you define a relationship with belongs_to, has_many or has_one etc. you can also define helper functions related to that collection:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :associations, :as => :associable, :dependent => :destroy
  has_many :sites, :through => :article_associations

  scope :originating_site, lambda { joins(:article_associations).where('content_associations.originating_site' => true).first }
  scope :primary_sites, lambda { joins(:article_associations).where('content_associations.primary_eligable' => true) }
  scope :secondary_sites, lambda { joins(:article_associations).where('content_associations.secondary_eligable' => true) }
end

class Site < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :content_associations, :as => :associable, :dependent => :destroy do
    def articles
      collect(&:associable).collect { |a| a.is_a? Article }
    end
  end
end

class ContentAssociation < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :site
  belongs_to :associable, :polymorphic => true
  belongs_to :primary_site, :class_name => "Site", :foreign_key => "site_id"
  belongs_to :secondary_site, :class_name => "Site", :foreign_key => "site_id"
  belongs_to :originating_site, :class_name => "Site", :foreign_key => "site_id"
end

You could move those function defs elsewhere if you need them to be more DRY:

module Content
  class Procs
    cattr_accessor :associations
    @@associations = lambda do
      def articles
        collect(&:associable).collect { |a| a.is_a? Article }
      end

      def events
        collect(&:associable).collect { |e| e.is_a? Event }
      end

      def bios
        collect(&:associable).collect { |b| b.is_a? Bio }
      end
    end
  end
end


class Site < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :content_associations, :as => :associable, :dependent => :destroy, &Content::Procs.associations
end

And since articles, events & bios in this example are all doing the same thing, we can DRY this even more:

module Content
  class Procs
    cattr_accessor :associations
    @@associations = lambda do
      %w(articles events bios).each do |type_name|
        type = eval type_name.singularize.classify
        define_method type_name do
          collect(&:associable).collect { |a| a.is_a? type }
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

And now it's starting to become more like a generic plugin, rather than application-specific code. Which is good, because you can reuse it easily.

Answer 2

Just a shot, but have you looked at polymorphic has_many :through => relationships? There's a few useful blog posts about - try http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/2006/4/3/polymorphic-through and http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/09/25/polymorphic-has_many-through-join-model/ (there was also a question here). Hope some of that helps a bit, good luck!