How do rails association methods work?

Question

How do rails association methods work? Lets consider this example

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
   has_many :articles
end

class Article < ActiveReco         


        

Answer 1

As metioned previously, when doing

@user.articles.class
=> Array

what you actually get is Array. That is because #class method was undefined, as also mentioned before.

But how do you get the actual class of @user.articles (which should be proxy)?

Object.instance_method(:class).bind(@user.articles).call
=> ActiveRecord::Associations::CollectionProxy

And why did you get Array in the first place? Because #class method was delegated to CollectionProxy @target instance through method missin, which is actually an array. You could peek behind the scene by doing something like this:

@user.articles.proxy_association