Summary

Hearsay is a plugin for Ruby On Rails that allows attributes of a model to loosely reference other models.

Installation

Add the gem to your Gemfile:

$ cat Gemfile
...
gem 'hearsay'
...

Install it with bundler:

$ bundle install

Run the generator to get the migration, and then migrate your database:

$ rails generate hearsay
$ rake db:migrate

Useage

Hearsay gives you two new class methods on your models:

• references association_name, options
• referenced_by association_name, options

The best way to explain the behavior is by example. Say I have a help desk app with the following models:

class Issue < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :comments, :polymorphic => true
  referenced_by :referencing_comments, :attribute => :body, :class_name => 'Comment'
  ...
end

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :commentable, :polymorphic => true
  references :issues, :attribute => :body, :matcher => /#([0-9]+)/i, :finder => :find_by_number
  ...
end

Next, I create a few issues, and finally a comment on one of them:

Issue.create(:number => 1)

issue = Issue.create(:number => 2)
issue.comments.create(:body => 'This comment also references Issue #1.')

When the comment on issue #2 is created, a Reference object is automatically created that also connects the comment to issue #1. This can be used to link to related issues in HTML output, or for any other situation where you might want to get at the originally referenced objects without re-scanning the body attribute. This is also handy if you want to search for comments that reference a specific issue, for instance.

To do

• tests

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!