Dynamic ORM Inheritance

Learning Goals

Explain why it is useful to have an ORM class from which other classes in your program can inherit
Describe the code that is used to construct such a class

Why Inheritance?

The great thing about a Dynamic ORM is that it provides us with a way to write an ORM that is almost entirely abstract. In other words, the methods we write that allow a given Ruby class and instances to communicate with a database are not specific to any one class.

This means we can use such methods again and again. We can define them in only one place and simply make them available, via inheritance, to any other class in our program.

The Super Class

In this repo, in the lib directory, you'll see the interactive_record.rb file. Open it up and take a look.

You'll see that the InteractiveRecord class contains almost all of the code responsible for communicating between our Ruby program and our database. All of the methods defined there are abstract––they do not reference explicit class or attribute names nor do they reference explicit table or column names.

These are methods that can be used by any Ruby class or instance, as long as we make them available to that class or instance.

The Child Class

Go ahead and open up lib/song.rb. Notice that the Song class inherits from InteractiveRecord. This means that all of the methods defined in InteractiveRecord are available to Song.

require_relative "./interactive_record.rb"

class Song < InteractiveRecord

  self.column_names.each do |col_name|
    attr_accessor col_name.to_sym
  end

end

The only code the Song class needs to contain is the code to create the attr_accessors specific to itself. But even that code uses a method, #column_names, inherited from the super class.

Our Code in Action

Open up the executable file in bin/run.

song = Song.new(name: "Hello", album: "25")
puts "song name: " + song.name
puts "song album: " + song.album
song.save

puts Song.find_by_name("Hello")

Here we create a new Song instance. Remember, there was no initialize method defined in the Song class itself -- it is inherited from the InteractiveRecord class.

After the Song instance is created, information about the song's name and album is printed out with puts. The song instance is then saved to the database.

Just to make sure everything is working, Song.find_by_name("Hello") is used to search the database for the newly created song. When ruby bin/run is run in your terminal, it should produce the following, confirming that the song was saved:

song name: Hello
song album: 25
{"id"=>1, "name"=>"Hello", "album"=>"25"}

The #initialize, #save and #find_by_name methods used by Song here were inherited from InteractiveRecord.

Looking Ahead

As we begin to build complex web applications using Sinatra and Rails, this pattern of inheritance will become familiar. In fact, we'll use an ORM tool called Active Record that handles all of the ORM interactions for us, and we'll simply inherit our Ruby classes from Active Record's classes.