Listing the names of associated models

Question

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base   has_many :comments   belongs_to :category end 

Is there a class method for Article with which I can retrieve a list of associations? I know by looking at the model's code that Article is associated to Comment and Category. But is there a method to get these associations programmatically?

Answer 1

You want ActiveRecord::Reflection::ClassMethods#reflect_on_all_associations

So it would be:

 Article.reflect_on_all_associations 

And you can pass in an optional parameter to narrow the search down, so:

 Article.reflect_on_all_associations(:has_many)   Article.reflect_on_all_associations(:belongs_to) 

Keep in mind that if you want the list of all the names of the models you can do something like:

Article.reflect_on_all_associations(:belongs_to).map(&:name) 

This will return a list of all the model names that belong to Article.