I have model Message. It may be posted by either Person or Organization from my DB. I want to call update.contact, where contact is Organization or Person.
class Update < ActiveRecord::Base
has_one :contact
The decision I like to use is like
class Organization < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :update, as: :contact
But this approach not available in Rails. Should I use polymorphic association? How to organize the architecture for this case?
It sounds like Organization and Person might be two different variants of a same entity (a customer, user, whatever). So, why not create a common parent model for the two of them? Such a parent wouldn't necessarily need a table, and you might just define common methods inside of it. Update is more of an action rather than an object, which could be applied to a Contact object (typically in its controller). For the Contact class, polymorphic association can be used. So you might have:
class Parent < ActiveRecord::Base
# stuff Person and Organization share
end
class Person < Parent
has_one :contact, as: :owner
# Person methods etc.
end
class Organization < Parent
has_one :contact, as: :owner
# Organization stuff
end
class Contact
belongs_to :owner, polymorphic: true
def update
#...
end
# other stuff for Contact
end
Then you can write lines like:
Person.first.contact.update
or whatever you need to do with your objects.
In case your Organization and Person don't differ too much, you could just create a table for the parent class, and add the has_one etc. in there.