Ruby on Rails - Overriding the association id creation process

Question

Hello there, I'm trying to override the way rails apply and id to an associated object, for example:

There are 2 simple models:

class Album < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :photos
end

class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :album
end

And then I want to do this:

album = Album.new :title => 'First Album'
album.photos.build
album.save #=> true

On this case I've created a plugin that overrides the id property and replaces it to a hashed string, so what I want to do is find the methods where this album_id is being replaced for my custom method instead of the int and be able to converted before it's saved. But I want to act globally inside Rails structure because since it will be a sort of plugin I want to make this action work on dynamic models, that's why I can't create an before_save validation on the model.

I'm not sure if it's easy to understand, but I hope someone could help me on that..

Here's a screenshot of my current table so you can see what is happening:

So as you can see the album_id it's being replaced for my custom ruby object when its saved...I've disabled the plugin and then it saved normally with records 11 and 12...

I want just act on a rails action and converted with my custom methods, something like

def rails_association_replaced_method(record)
   #take the record associations and apply a to_i custom method before save
   super(record)
end

something like this :)

Well I hope this didn't get too complicated

Cheers

Answer 1

Rails is unfriendly to that kind of change to the defaults. What's your end goal here?

Answer 2

It seems if I only override theActiveRecord::Base save method do the job if handled properly

define_method 'save' do
  int_fields = self.class.columns.find_all { |column| column.type == :integer }
  int_fields.each do |field|
    if self.attributes[field.name]
      self.attributes[field.name] = self.attributes[field.name].to_i
    end
  end
  super
end

And this shall replace all the integer fields from the Current Model applying a to_i method over the result.