don't assume a reflect_on_association method

[jrochkind]

I'm experimenting with using cocoon in a context where some of the models involved are ActiveModels rather than ActiveRecord::Base. For my work with this gem.

It actually works out pretty well, most parts of cocoon don't assume that the collections involved actually have AR reflection info, for instance. Perhaps some work has gone in this direction before!

There are just a couple places where cocoon is assuming methods exist where I'd rather it didn't.

This is one of them, which seems pretty straightforward to do something about -- it was accepting a nil return value from reflect_on_association anyway (and doing the right thing for my use case in that situation), so just have it not try to call the method if it doesn't exist, and just go with the nil value. Seems quite clean and neat.

What do you think?

[danbernier]

@jrochkind I don't know if you're still working on this, but if you have any other notes on getting cocoon to work with ActiveModels, I'm bashing my way through it now.

[jrochkind]

@danbernier I don't remember the details, but I did get cocoon working for my use cases in attr_json.

Basically, every time I ran into cocoon assuming a certain method was there, I went and looked at AR to see what the method did, and then just implemented it to do the "right" thing for my non-AR models. It was only a few methods. It was over two years ago, I don't remember all the details, but you can try searching for PR's or commits that mention cocoon.

Oh wait, look! As I look at my code, I see I extracted some stuff into a module, I don't know if it will meet your needs, but there's this: https://github.com/jrochkind/attr_json/blob/master/lib/attr_json/model/cocoon_compat.rb

Unfortunately it looks like the only spec I have that exersizes my cocoon compatibility is this kind of monstrous not well factored one: https://github.com/jrochkind/attr_json/blob/master/spec/integration/form_mega_spec.rb

[danbernier]

@jrochkind thank you! That's helpful. I've followed in your footsteps and came to a similar place, which is reassuring. If I bump into anything else, I'll note it here.

[jrochkind]

Since cocoon works fine, I have found, if you just return nil or false from those methods, it would be easy to PR cocoon to check respond_to? before calling them, and just follow the nil/false path if not.

but it's unclear to me if theres anyone maintaining cocoon who would be interested in entertaining such a PR. Based on this PR sitting here without comment for two years, apparently not.