Giving up on has_many_polymorphs bug after an hour

I remember reading about has_many_polymorphs a couple of years ago, then again last year. Each time around when I wanted some sort of polymorphic has_many :through. Each time I figured, “Eh, it’s just another couple of tables” or “I can just map them in a method in the model, there’s not that much data”. But this time I finally gave it a try.

First I got this error when using the gem with Rails 3: has_many_polymorphs/support_methods.rb:69:in `warn': wrong number of arguments (1 for 3) (ArgumentError). So I looked at the github network graph and found a branch that seemed to fix that.

That worked, but next I got this: Could not find a valid class for :collections_items (tried CollectionsItem). If it's namespaced, be sure to specify it as :"module/collections_items" instead. (ActiveRecord::Associations::PolymorphicError) What are they trying to do, pluralize post positive adjectives? My model is named CollectionItem, which seems sensible to me.

This time I try adding a :through option to set it straight.

  has_many :collection_items
  has_many_polymorphs :items, :through => :collection_items, :from => [:sprites, :collections]

Now I get the following amazing error message:

has_many_polymorphs/class_methods.rb:441:in `create_has_many_through_associations_for_children_to_parent': You can't have a self-referential polymorphic has_many :through without renaming the non-polymorphic foreign key in the join model. (ActiveRecord::Associations::PolymorphicError)

This probably makes sense to everyone except me, but I’ve got to work with the skills I’m given.

What I’d really like is for polymorphic has_many :through to ‘just work'(TM).

Something kind of EXACTLY LIKE this:

class CollectionItem  true
end

class Collection  :collection_items
end

Why is that so hard? No one will ever know…

So I did what I always do:

class Collection < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  has_many :collection_items

  def items
    collection_items.map(&:item)
  end
end

After all, there’s not that much data anyway…

Author: Daniel X

Heretic priest of the Machine God. I enjoy crawling around in Jeff Bezo's spaceship, bringing technology to the people, and long walks outside of time and space. View all posts by Daniel X