Rails Polymorphic Many-to-Many

The application I'm working on is going to allow for the import of contacts from a variety of services. It will be possible to send invitations to these contacts. These contacts can then come to the site and sign up to become users.

In order to avoid the validations and other such nonsense that is placed on my user model, I have created a Contact model. This means that we're dealing with a contact model, a user model, and a join table that links Users to either contacts or other users:

class Contact < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :user_contacts, :as => :contactable
  has_many :users, :through => :user_contacts
end

class UserContact < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :contactable, :polymorphic => true
  belongs_to :user
end

And this terrifying abomination:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :user_contacts
  has_many :contactable_contacts, :foreign_key => 'contactable_id', :class_name => 'UserContact', :as => :contactable
  has_many :contactables, :through => :user_contacts
end

I'm going to just make two join tables for now, but I really feel like this behavior shouldn't be all that difficult to pull off. Can anyone offer me any feedback?

Thanks in advance.

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

Rails Polymorphic Many-to-Many

related questions