Activerecord Plurals

A simple rails plugin for batch-retrieving specific fields of activerecord models.

Installation

As rails plugin: rails plugin install git://github.com/gurdotan/activerecord_plurals.git

As a gem: Add gem "activerecord_plurals" to your Gemfile and run bundle install.

Usage

For example, assume we have a table of animals, assocsiated to the Animal ActiveRecord model. We can do the following:

>> Animal.names
=> ["Horse", "Cat", "Dog", "Chimpanzee", "Snake"]

>> Animal.ids
=> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

>> Animal.where(:type => "domestic").names
=> ["Cat", "Dog"]

So in fact this plugin supplies you with plural methods for all activerecord fields. That includes all of the model's fields, along with ids, created_ats and updated_ats.

Known Issues

If you have an activerecord model with a field who's plural form collides with an already exsiting method (say 'entry' collides with Object#entries), you won't be able to invoke a plural method, the original method will be called.

These issues will be fixed in the next release.

Testing Notes

To run the tests: cd <RAILS_ROOT>/vendor/plugins/activerecord_plurals rake
The tests are written in rspec and make use of a private SQLite3 DB file. This is why you will need to run bundle install in order to run the tests. Bundler will install the sqlite3-ruby gem which is a dependency of the tests.
Tested only on Rails 3.

Knock yourselves out!