What you are describing cannot be accomplished with a single query. The issue 
is that a polymorphic association requires that you query the db to determine 
the class of the model, and you need that information to know what table to 
query to get the record you want. Some SQL dbs provide some kind of recursive 
query that might be able to do what you want in one query, but it would be 
pretty complicated and I can't guess how difficult it would be to manage the 
performance of those queries. That doesn't seem like something for core. If you 
want many-to-many association with polymorphism in one query, one way is to use 
has_many :through with an STI associated model. 

--
Josh Susser


On Saturday, September 8, 2012 at 4:30 AM, ChuckE wrote:

> Hi,
> I'm currently having the situation where I have to implement a polymorphic 
> has_and_belongs_to_many by introducing an in between model that handles all 
> the "has_many :as" and "belongs_to :polymorphic" association 
> implementations... and is not doing anything else. Thing I don't like it here 
> is, I am unnecessarily loading AR instances only to execute SQL that leads me 
> to whatever data I want to fetch. I would then gladly remove the models, keep 
> the DB tables, and have is all work with some kind of has_and_belongs_to_many 
> polymorphic magic. Something like:
> class Song < ActiveRecord::Base has_and_belongs_to_many :genres, :as => 
> :taggable end class Genre < ActiveRecord::Base has_and_belongs_to_many 
> :taggables, :polymorphic => true end 
> 
> or similar, I haven't put much thought into that. I would like to hear some 
> opinion of more experienced Rails developers to know if this would be a 
> valuable feature. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 


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