acts_as_eav_model 0.0.0

data/.rvmrc

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+rvm --create use 1.9.2@acts_as_eav_model

data/CHANGELOG

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+* First version with base functionality to handle Entity-attribute-value model (EAV) pattern.
+
+* CHANGELOG started [Marcus Wyatt]

data/Gemfile

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+source "http://rubygems.org"
+
+gem "rails", "3.0.1"
+gem "sqlite3-ruby", :require => "sqlite3"
+gem "jeweler"
+
+if RUBY_VERSION < '1.9'
+  gem "ruby-debug", ">= 0.10.3"
+end
+
+group :test do
+	gem "rspec-rails", "~> 2.0"
+end

data/Gemfile.lock

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+GEM
+  remote: http://rubygems.org/
+  specs:
+    abstract (1.0.0)
+    actionmailer (3.0.1)
+      actionpack (= 3.0.1)
+      mail (~> 2.2.5)
+    actionpack (3.0.1)
+      activemodel (= 3.0.1)
+      activesupport (= 3.0.1)
+      builder (~> 2.1.2)
+      erubis (~> 2.6.6)
+      i18n (~> 0.4.1)
+      rack (~> 1.2.1)
+      rack-mount (~> 0.6.12)
+      rack-test (~> 0.5.4)
+      tzinfo (~> 0.3.23)
+    activemodel (3.0.1)
+      activesupport (= 3.0.1)
+      builder (~> 2.1.2)
+      i18n (~> 0.4.1)
+    activerecord (3.0.1)
+      activemodel (= 3.0.1)
+      activesupport (= 3.0.1)
+      arel (~> 1.0.0)
+      tzinfo (~> 0.3.23)
+    activeresource (3.0.1)
+      activemodel (= 3.0.1)
+      activesupport (= 3.0.1)
+    activesupport (3.0.1)
+    arel (1.0.1)
+      activesupport (~> 3.0.0)
+    builder (2.1.2)
+    diff-lcs (1.1.2)
+    erubis (2.6.6)
+      abstract (>= 1.0.0)
+    git (1.2.5)
+    i18n (0.4.2)
+    jeweler (1.5.1)
+      bundler (~> 1.0.0)
+      git (>= 1.2.5)
+      rake
+    mail (2.2.9)
+      activesupport (>= 2.3.6)
+      i18n (~> 0.4.1)
+      mime-types (~> 1.16)
+      treetop (~> 1.4.8)
+    mime-types (1.16)
+    polyglot (0.3.1)
+    rack (1.2.1)
+    rack-mount (0.6.13)
+      rack (>= 1.0.0)
+    rack-test (0.5.6)
+      rack (>= 1.0)
+    rails (3.0.1)
+      actionmailer (= 3.0.1)
+      actionpack (= 3.0.1)
+      activerecord (= 3.0.1)
+      activeresource (= 3.0.1)
+      activesupport (= 3.0.1)
+      bundler (~> 1.0.0)
+      railties (= 3.0.1)
+    railties (3.0.1)
+      actionpack (= 3.0.1)
+      activesupport (= 3.0.1)
+      rake (>= 0.8.4)
+      thor (~> 0.14.0)
+    rake (0.8.7)
+    rspec (2.1.0)
+      rspec-core (~> 2.1.0)
+      rspec-expectations (~> 2.1.0)
+      rspec-mocks (~> 2.1.0)
+    rspec-core (2.1.0)
+    rspec-expectations (2.1.0)
+      diff-lcs (~> 1.1.2)
+    rspec-mocks (2.1.0)
+    rspec-rails (2.1.0)
+      rspec (~> 2.1.0)
+    sqlite3-ruby (1.3.2)
+    thor (0.14.4)
+    treetop (1.4.8)
+      polyglot (>= 0.3.1)
+    tzinfo (0.3.23)
+
+PLATFORMS
+  ruby
+
+DEPENDENCIES
+  jeweler
+  rails (= 3.0.1)
+  rspec-rails (~> 2.0)
+  sqlite3-ruby

data/MIT-LICENSE

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+Copyright (c) 2008 Marcus Wyatt
+
+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.

data/README.rdoc

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+ActsAsEavModel
+==============
+
+ActsAsEavModel allow for the Entity-attribute-value model (EAV), also 
+known as object-attribute-value model and open schema on any of your ActiveRecord
+models. 
+
+= What is Entity-attribute-value model?
+Entity-attribute-value model (EAV) is a data model that is used in circumstances 
+where the number of attributes (properties, parameters) that can be used to describe 
+a thing (an "entity" or "object") is potentially very vast, but the number that will 
+actually apply to a given entity is relatively modest.
+
+= Typical Problem
+A good example of this is where you need to store
+lots (possible hundreds) of optional attributes on an object. My typical
+reference example is when you have a User object. You want to store the
+user's preferences between sessions. Every search, sort, etc in your
+application you want to keep track of so when the user visits that section
+of the application again you can simply restore the display to how it was.
+
+So your controller might have:
+
+  Project.find :all, :conditions => current_user.project_search,
+    :order => current_user.project_order
+
+But there could be hundreds of these little attributes that you really don't
+want to store directly on the user object. It would make your table have too
+many columns so it would be too much of a pain to deal with. Also there might
+be performance problems. So instead you might do something like
+this:
+
+  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
+    has_many :preferences
+  end
+
+  class Preferences < ActiveRecord::Base
+    belongs_to :user
+  end
+
+Now simply give the Preference model a "name" and "value" column and you are
+set..... except this is now too complicated. To retrieve a attribute you will
+need to do something like:
+
+  Project.find :all,
+    :conditions => current_user.preferences.find_by_name('project_search').value,
+    :order => current_user.preferences.find_by_name('project_order').value
+
+Sure you could fix this through a few methods on your model. But what about
+saving?
+
+  current_user.preferences.create :name => 'project_search',
+    :value => "lastname LIKE 'jones%'"
+  current_user.preferences.create :name => 'project_order',
+    :value => "name"
+
+Again this seems to much. Again we could add some methods to our model to
+make this simpler but do we want to do this on every model. NO! So instead
+we use this plugin which does everything for us.
+
+= Capabilities
+
+The ActsAsEavModel plugin is capable of modeling this problem in a intuitive
+way. Instead of having to deal with a related model you treat all attributes
+(both on the model and related) as if they are all on the model. The plugin
+will try to save all attributes to the model (normal ActiveRecord behavior)
+but if there is no column for an attribute it will try to save it to a
+related model whose purpose is to store these many sparsely populated
+attributes.
+
+The main design goals are:
+
+* Have the eav attributes feel like normal attributes. Simple gets and sets
+  will add and remove records from the related model.
+* Allow for more than one related model. So for example on my User model I might
+  have some eav behavior going into a contact_info table while others are
+  going in a user_preferences table.
+* Allow a model to determine what a valid eav attribute is for a given
+  related model so our model still can generate a NoMethodError.
+
+Example
+=======
+
+Will make the current class have eav behaviour.
+
+  class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
+    has_eav_behavior
+  end
+  post = Post.find_by_title 'hello world'
+  puts "My post intro is: #{post.intro}"
+  post.teaser = 'An awesome introduction to the blog'
+  post.save
+
+The above example should work even though "intro" and "teaser" are not
+attributes on the Post model.
+
+= Installation
+
+    ./script/plugin install acts_as_eav_model
+
+= RUNNING UNIT TESTS
+
+== Creating the test database
+
+The test databases will be created from the info specified in test/database.yml.
+Either change that file to match your database or change your database to
+match that file.
+
+== Running with Rake
+
+The easiest way to run the unit tests is through Rake. By default sqlite3
+will be the database run. Just change your env variable DB to be the database
+adaptor (specified in database.yml) that you want to use. The database and
+permissions must already be setup but the tables will be created for you
+from schema.rb.
+
+Copyright (c) 2008 Marcus Wyatt, released under the MIT license

data/Rakefile

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+# encoding: UTF-8
+require 'rubygems'
+begin
+  require 'bundler/setup'
+rescue LoadError
+  puts 'You must `gem install bundler` and `bundle install` to run rake tasks'
+end
+
+require 'rake'
+require 'rake/rdoctask'
+
+require 'rspec/core'
+require 'rspec/core/rake_task'
+
+RSpec::Core::RakeTask.new(:spec)
+
+
+Rake::RDocTask.new(:rdoc) do |rdoc|
+  rdoc.rdoc_dir = 'rdoc'
+  rdoc.title    = 'Acts As EAV Model'
+  rdoc.options << '--line-numbers' << '--inline-source'
+  rdoc.rdoc_files.include('README.rdoc')
+  rdoc.rdoc_files.include('lib/**/*.rb')
+end
+
+begin
+  require 'jeweler'
+  Jeweler::Tasks.new do |gem|
+    gem.name = "acts_as_eav_model"
+    gem.summary = %Q{Entity Attribute Value Implementation for inclusion in ActiveRecord models.}
+    gem.description = %Q{Entity-attribute-value model (EAV) is a data model that is used in circumstances 
+    where the number of attributes (properties, parameters) that can be used to describe 
+    a thing (an "entity" or "object") is potentially very vast, but the number that will 
+    actually apply to a given entity is relatively modest.}
+    gem.email = ""
+    gem.homepage = "http://github.com/g5search/acts_as_eav_model"
+    gem.has_rdoc=true
+    gem.authors = ["Marcus Wyatt"]
+    # gem is a Gem::Specification... see http://www.rubygems.org/read/chapter/20 for additional settings
+  end
+  Jeweler::GemcutterTasks.new
+rescue LoadError
+  puts "Jeweler (or a dependency) not available. Install it with: gem install jeweler"
+end
+
+task :default => :spec

data/SPECDOC

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+
+ActiveRecord Model annotated with 'has_eav_behavior' with no options in declaration
+- should have many attributes
+- should create new attribute on save
+- should delete attribute
+- should write eav attributes to attributes table
+- should return nil when attribute does not exist
+- should use method missing to make attribute seem as native property
+- should read attributes using subscript notation
+- should read the attribute when invoking 'read_attribute'
+
+ActiveRecord Model annotated with 'has_eav_behavior' with options in declaration
+- should be 'has_many' association on both sides
+- should only allow restricted fields when specified (:fields => %w(phone aim icq))
+- should raise 'NoMethodError' when attribute not in 'eav_attributes' method array
+- should raise 'NoMethodError' when attribute does not satisfy 'is_eav_attribute?' method
+
+Validations on ActiveRecord Model annotated with 'has_eav_behavior'
+- should execute as normal (validates_presence_of)
+
+Finished in 0.239663 seconds
+
+13 examples, 0 failures

data/VERSION

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+0.0.0

data/doc/classes/ActiveRecord/Acts/EavModel.html

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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
+<!DOCTYPE html 
+     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
+     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+  <title>Module: ActiveRecord::Acts::EavModel</title>
+  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
+  <meta http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript" />
+  <link rel="stylesheet" href="../../.././rdoc-style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
+  <script type="text/javascript">
+  // <![CDATA[
+
+  function popupCode( url ) {
+    window.open(url, "Code", "resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,toolbar=no,status=no,height=150,width=400")
+  }
+
+  function toggleCode( id ) {
+    if ( document.getElementById )
+      elem = document.getElementById( id );
+    else if ( document.all )
+      elem = eval( "document.all." + id );
+    else
+      return false;
+
+    elemStyle = elem.style;
+    
+    if ( elemStyle.display != "block" ) {
+      elemStyle.display = "block"
+    } else {
+      elemStyle.display = "none"
+    }
+
+    return true;
+  }
+  
+  // Make codeblocks hidden by default
+  document.writeln( "<style type=\"text/css\">div.method-source-code { display: none }</style>" )
+  
+  // ]]>
+  </script>
+
+</head>
+<body>
+
+
+
+    <div id="classHeader">
+        <table class="header-table">
+        <tr class="top-aligned-row">
+          <td><strong>Module</strong></td>
+          <td class="class-name-in-header">ActiveRecord::Acts::EavModel</td>
+        </tr>
+        <tr class="top-aligned-row">
+            <td><strong>In:</strong></td>
+            <td>
+                <a href="../../../files/lib/acts_as_eav_model_rb.html">
+                lib/acts_as_eav_model.rb
+                </a>
+        <br />
+            </td>
+        </tr>
+
+        </table>
+    </div>
+  <!-- banner header -->
+
+  <div id="bodyContent">
+
+
+
+  <div id="contextContent">
+
+    <div id="description">
+      <p>
+ActsAsEavModel allow for the Entity-attribute-value model (EAV), also known
+as object-attribute-value model and open schema on any of your ActiveRecord
+models.
+</p>
+<h1>What is Entity-attribute-value model?</h1>
+<p>
+Entity-attribute-value model (EAV) is a data model that is used in
+circumstances where the number of attributes (properties, parameters) that
+can be used to describe a thing (an &quot;entity&quot; or
+&quot;object&quot;) is potentially very vast, but the number that will
+actually apply to a given entity is relatively modest.
+</p>
+<h1>Typical Problem</h1>
+<p>
+A good example of this is where you need to store lots (possible hundreds)
+of optional attributes on an object. My typical reference example is when
+you have a User object. You want to store the user&#8216;s preferences
+between sessions. Every search, sort, etc in your application you want to
+keep track of so when the user visits that section of the application again
+you can simply restore the display to how it was.
+</p>
+<p>
+So your controller might have:
+</p>
+<pre>
+  Project.find :all, :conditions =&gt; current_user.project_search,
+    :order =&gt; current_user.project_order
+</pre>
+<p>
+But there could be hundreds of these little attributes that you really
+don&#8216;t want to store directly on the user object. It would make your
+table have too many columns so it would be too much of a pain to deal with.
+Also there might be performance problems. So instead you might do something
+like this:
+</p>
+<pre>
+  class User &lt; ActiveRecord::Base
+    has_many :preferences
+  end
+
+  class Preferences &lt; ActiveRecord::Base
+    belongs_to :user
+  end
+</pre>
+<p>
+Now simply give the Preference model a &quot;name&quot; and
+&quot;value&quot; column and you are set.&#8230;. except this is now too
+complicated. To retrieve a attribute you will need to do something like:
+</p>
+<pre>
+  Project.find :all,
+    :conditions =&gt; current_user.preferences.find_by_name('project_search').value,
+    :order =&gt; current_user.preferences.find_by_name('project_order').value
+</pre>
+<p>
+Sure you could fix this through a few methods on your model. But what about
+saving?
+</p>
+<pre>
+  current_user.preferences.create :name =&gt; 'project_search',
+    :value =&gt; &quot;lastname LIKE 'jones%'&quot;
+  current_user.preferences.create :name =&gt; 'project_order',
+    :value =&gt; &quot;name&quot;
+</pre>
+<p>
+Again this seems to much. Again we could add some methods to our model to
+make this simpler but do we want to do this on every model. NO! So instead
+we use this plugin which does everything for us.
+</p>
+<h1>Capabilities</h1>
+<p>
+The ActsAsEavModel plugin is capable of modeling this problem in a
+intuitive way. Instead of having to deal with a related model you treat all
+attributes (both on the model and related) as if they are all on the model.
+The plugin will try to save all attributes to the model (normal
+ActiveRecord behaviour) but if there is no column for an attribute it will
+try to save it to a related model whose purpose is to store these many
+sparsly populated attributes.
+</p>
+<p>
+The main design goals are:
+</p>
+<ul>
+<li>Have the eav attributes feel like normal attributes. Simple gets and sets
+will add and remove records from the related model.
+
+</li>
+<li>Allow for more than one related model. So for example on my User model I
+might have some eav behavior going into a contact_info table while others
+are going in a user_preferences table.
+
+</li>
+<li>Allow a model to determine what a valid eav attribute is for a given
+related model so our model still can generate a NoMethodError.
+
+</li>
+</ul>
+
+    </div>
+
+
+   </div>
+
+
+  </div>
+
+
+    <!-- if includes -->
+
+    <div id="section">
+
+    <div id="class-list">
+      <h3 class="section-bar">Classes and Modules</h3>
+
+      Module <a href="EavModel/ClassMethods.html" class="link">ActiveRecord::Acts::EavModel::ClassMethods</a><br />
+Module <a href="EavModel/InstanceMethods.html" class="link">ActiveRecord::Acts::EavModel::InstanceMethods</a><br />
+
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+      
+
+
+    <!-- if method_list -->
+
+
+  </div>
+
+
+<div id="validator-badges">
+  <p><small><a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer">[Validate]</a></small></p>
+</div>
+
+</body>
+</html>