h1. <a href="http://lockdown.rubyforge.org">Classy Inheritance</a>

<i>"You stay classy, inheritance" - Gibson</i>  

h2. Consolidation of information

Maintaining this page, the wiki at GitHub, the Google Group and no issue tracker is not an ideal setup.  So, everything is moving to "stonean.com":http://stonean.com where I'm giving "Redmine":http://redmine.org a shot a running everything for me. I'll be posting release announcements to the news feed for each project and keeping the docs up-to-date.  Hopefully this will be better for everyone.

Thanks for your interest in Classy Inheritance,<br/>
-andy


h2. What

For now, Classy Inheritance adds a depends_on class method to your ActiveRecord model so that you can define requisite objects. 
More functionality coming for optional relationships.

You can define the relationship to be polymorphic:
<pre>
class Picture < ActiveRecord::Base
  depends_on :image, :attrs => [:filename, :height, :width], :as => "imageable"
end
</pre>

This will look for "imageable_type" and "imageable_id" on the images table add set them accordingly.

Or you can define a standard belongs_to relationship:
<pre>
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  depends_on :profile, :attrs => [:first_name, :last_name, :email]
end
</pre>

h3. What does it do for me?

Well, for starters you get pass-through methods added to your model.  So, in the above User example you would get the following:

<pre>
  @user.first_name
  @user.last_name
  @user.email
  @user.first_name=
  @user.last_name=
  @user.email=
</pre>

This means you can use these attributes on your form and in your controller instead of having to worry about creating/updating a separate Profile model.  

For the above example, you'll also get a "find_with_profile" class method that will do the :include => :profile addition to your find call for you.

h2. Installing

<pre>
$ sudo gem install classy-inheritance

# in environment.rb add:
require "classy-inheritance"

</pre>

h2. Github

The Clone URL: git://github.com/stonean/classy-inheritance.git

Read the "8 steps for fixing other people's code":http://drnicwilliams.com/2007/06/01/8-steps-for-fixing-other-peoples-code/.

I'm new to git and this whole opensource project admin gig, so please be patient with my stumbling around.

h2. Contact

Please use the "forum":http://stonean.com/projects/classy-inheritance/boards to ask questions and the "issue tracker":http://stonean.com/projects/classy-inheritance/issues to report problems or submit a pull request.

h2. License

This code is free to use under the terms of the MIT license.

Copyright (c) 2008 Andrew Stone