ActiveRecord::Base Without Table

  class Contact < ActiveRecord::BaseWithoutTable
    column :name, :string
    column :email_address, :string
    column :message, :text

    validates_presence_of :name, :email_address, :string
  end

Vitals

Repository	http://svn.viney.net.nz/things/rails/plugins/active_record_base_without_table/
License	Rails' (MIT)
Tags	activerecord class sssss Add tag:
Rating	(44 votes)
Owner	Jonathan Viney
Created	4 November 2006

Comments

• 

  Maksim

  17 January 2007

  Hi! I tried installing your plugin into my rails application only to find out that it does nothing. Is it incomplete, or perhaps I got something wrong?

• 

  Jason

  6 February 2007

  Wow - this BaseWithoutTable plugin business really cleans up email form validation!

  If anyone is interested in an example, I knocked up a quick <a href="http://www.kangarooit.com/developer_blog/2007/02/email-form-validation-in-ruby-on-rails.php">form validation with BaseWithoutTable tutorial</a>

• 

  Marco

  27 February 2007

  Can u post your example, please?

• 

  Frank

  5 March 2007

  Could it be that "after methods" like after_save are not be called?

• polypus

  13 March 2007

  interesting plugin, but please change the name to TablelessModels or something. calling it active record will confuse people.

• 

  Buri Erich

  24 July 2007

  Hello, I tried to install the plugin but I continuously get a timeout on the repository address mentioned above.

  Is there an other location where I could find that plugin?

• 

  Michail

  8 August 2007

  Thanks a lot! This plugin works just perfectly! This is Exactly what I needed and it was really easy to install (first time i got it done so easily with rails plugins). This is even though I am sitting under heavy company firewall and had to copy all files manually :) Great job!

• 

  Daniel Fischer

  8 August 2007

  This doesn't seem to work with the id ? I tried to use this in a test as an abstract model that doesn't require a model in the application, and when I tested against the id it completely failed. It just gave me nil.

• 

  Ede

  15 August 2007

  I've had a problem with this plugin if a named my model-classes different to the file name where the classes were nested. To solve this, just add

  require "filename"

  to your environment.rb and all classes in this file will be available in Rails as models without table.

• 

  jeff

  20 November 2007

  awesome plugin works like a charm

• Vinicius Horewicz

  7 January 2008

  This plugin got broke on Rails 2. To fix, you must alter 'read_methods' to 'generated_methods' on line 21 on base_without_table.rb BTW, great job!

• 

  Clinton R. Nixon

  23 January 2008

  The fix is easy, but if you don't want to make it yourself, I've forked this into a Git repo and made it:

  http://gitorious.org/projects/activerecord-basewithouttable-for-rails-2

• 

  Brandon Taylor

  11 February 2008

  Wow. When I emailed the author of this plugin for help, after it didn't work, following the instructions VERBATIM. He directed me to a Rails mailing list. Not cool. 0 out of 5 stars for me.

• 

  Ben

  30 April 2008

  Love the plugin, but inheritance is broken. A column defined in the base class is not visible from a subclass. Anyone have a fix?

• miké

  24 May 2008

  The problem is that it doesn't work with inheritance. Any idea ?

• 

  Chad

  19 June 2008

  Ah. As Vinicius noted, this is broken for Rails 2. However, there was a typo in his fix.

  readmethods must be changed to generated_methods (with an underscore)

  Do not forget to restart your server after you make the fix!

  This is a useful module. Why not apply this fix to the repository for everyone's benefit? (well, rails 2 users anyway).

• 

  Paul

  30 July 2008

  For anyone using this and trying to use a date_select, and hitting this problem

  http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/10352

  Here's a workaround, that doesn't involve hacking the rails core or the plugin. It's all to do with rails needing to ask what the class (klass) of a column is, and it looks up the database type. Seeing as we don't have a table, we bork out.

  In your model that inherits from BaseWithoutTable, override the 'column_for_attribute' method, and add exceptions for the fields you are using with 'date_select'. Here I am using the 'dob' field

  def column_for_attribute(attribute)

  if (attribute.to_s.eql? 'dob')
    Date
  else
    super(attribute)
  end
  

  end

  This returns a date class when we ask for the column for 'dob'.

  This isn't the whole story, however, as rails then calls the 'klass' method on this class (as I think it's expecting an AR 'column' object)

  So somewhere in your project (I always put my extensions to the Date class in the lib folder somewhere), you need to define

  def Date.klass Date end

  Then everything should work fine.
  

  I'm sure someone out there's got a better engineered workaround. But I hope this gets someone out of a hole.

  Maybe I'll look to see if I can plug this hole by modifying the plugin...

• Csongor G.

  13 August 2008

  Not trying to be too finicky but the fix for Rails 2.x is actually replacing read_methods (not readmethods) with generated_methods

• 

  Raven

  21 January 2009

  This looks good but is it maintained enought for production? Will it work with rails 2.0.2 or is that to new? Thanks.

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