I have an XML feed I am pulling down and parsing in my Rails app. I started to implement it as a library in lib/ but it seemed more logical to me to treat it as a model. For convenience I am treating it as an ActiveRecord model. A requirement is that it is compatible with mislav's will_paginate plugin, although that is where I am having the issue.
I have created a class in app/models/ that inherits from ActiveRecord::Base and simply override the default method for find. If there's an easier way I'm all ears. But this is working.
class Job < ActiveRecord::Base
def self.columns() @columns ||= []; end
def self.column(name, sql_type = nil, default = nil, null = true)
columns << ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::Column.new(name.to_s, default, sql_type.to_s, null)
end
column :title, :string
column :company, :string
def self.find(*args)
url = "http://example.com"
xml = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(url)).body
doc = REXML::Document.new(xml)
if args.first.to_s == 'all'
results = Array.new
doc.elements.each('response/results/result') do |r|
job = self.new(
:title => r.elements['jobtitle'].text,
:company => r.elements['company'].text
)
results.push(job)
end
results
end
end
end
So with that working, the next step is try to paginate the collection. For this I am attempting to use mislav's will_paginate since I am using this plugin for my typical models. The issue is that will_paginate attempts to get a count of the number of total jobs. It does this by running a "SELECT count(*) AS count_all FROM jobs" automatically. Of course this fails since no such table exists.
Without modifying the code of will_paginate is there an easy way to correct this issue but still allow standard models to use will_paginate normally?