I had an ah ha moment that maybe shouldn’t have been such an ah ha moment but it was so I figured I would share it. Yeah so I am sure most of us have had a situation where we needed to have multiple model forms. Most of the time now days I use attribute_fu to solve this issue but attribute_fu doesn’t work with has_one associations. Today I had a situation where I had two fields that were required for a has_one association object. Long story short it came to me that if we just used the delegate method provided by rails that we could essentially act like the attributes we were setting were on the parent model. This meant we only needed to create one form with multiple fields even though some of those fields were actually on a different model. I then remembered that back when I was working with the guys over at ThoughtWorks that we used a Ruby Extension called Forwardable to be able to delegate multiple attributes on one object.

So instead of this:

delegate :first_name, :to => :profile
delegate :last_name, :to => :profile
delegate :some_other_attribute, :to => :profile


side note: I’m not sure but I don’t believe delegate can take multiple attributes (I tried to look this up but for some reason couldn’t find the documentation for this method and didn’t have time to dig in the code)

You could do the following:

include the Ruby Extension Forwardable in the parent model class


include Forwardable


and then add this line:

def_delegators :profile, :first_name, :last_name, :some_other_attribute


So yeah that was my little ah ha moment. I am sure there are even better ways than this but this was better than what we were looking at doing to begin with.

Hello Ladies,
I am reporting from RailsConf 2008. The main focus of this post is logistics for the conference. I’ll be posting about the talks as soon as I get to attend one. I have been running around trying to take care of DevChix related stuff.

We were unable to get an official room for a BoF but I have decided we will just take over some area of the convention center. Lets meet outside Exhibit Hall E at 7:30 on Saturday night. We can discuss whatever we want to. We are also planning appetizers and cocktails after the BoF. Hashrocket Inc, the company I work for is sponsoring the evening. Thanks Hashrocket!

Please either come to the BoF for more information or find one of the ladies with a DevChix logo on their badges for more information. I will also have stickers to give out (until they run out).

We would love to meet ALL the women developers at the conference so please come out and get to know us.

Cheers
Desi