#ActiveRecordComposition ActiveRecord is awesome, inheritance is not always so awesome. This gem is for people who want to use ActiveRecord but don't want to be forced to use inheritance of ActiveRecord::Base in their models. It dynamically creates a composition relationship with a subclass of ActiveRecord::Base and transparently delegates Active Record interactions to the newly generated class.

##Use In your Gemfile add:

gem 'active_record_composition'

Then run:

bundle

Now you take away the inheritance of ActiveRecord::Base from your models and add include ActiveRecordComposition to the first line:

class ExampleA < class MyParent; end
  include ActiveRecordComposition
  has_many :example_bs, :foreign_key => 'example_a_id'
end

class ExampleB < class MyOtherParent; end
  include ActiveRecordComposition
  belongs_to :example_a
end

You can see in the example above we are inheriting from our own classes since we no longer have to manage inheritance of ActiveRecord::Base. You can now go ahead and use your models as if they are active records like so:

example_a = ExampleA.create(:a => 2)
ExampleB.create(:example_a => example_a, :a => 3)
example_b = ExampleB.where(:example_a_id => example_a).first

ActiveRecordComposition creates a class behind the scenes named "your class name"ActiveComposite. For the class ExampleA it would be ExampleAActiveComposite. There are situations where you will need to reference this class (single table inheritance, many-to-many for the :through key, etc.

For has_many accociations you should specify the foreign key with :foreign_key.

##License (The MIT License)

Copyright (c) Kevin Beddingfield

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.