List dynamic attributes in a Mongoid Model - ruby

Question

I have gone over the documentation, and I can't find a specific way to go about this. I have already added some dynamic attributes to a model, and I would like to be able to iterate over all of them.
So, for a concrete example:
class Order
include Mongoid::Document
field :status, type: String, default: "pending"
end
And then I do the following:
Order.new(status: "processed", internal_id: "1111")
And later I want to come back and be able to get a list/array of all the dynamic attributes (in this case, "internal_id" is it).
I'm still digging, but I'd love to hear if anyone else has solved this already.

Answer 1

Just include something like this in your model:
module DynamicAttributeSupport
def self.included(base)
base.send :include, InstanceMethods
end
module InstanceMethods
def dynamic_attributes
attributes.keys - _protected_attributes[:default].to_a - fields.keys
end
def static_attributes
fields.keys - dynamic_attributes
end
end
end
and here is a spec to go with it:
require 'spec_helper'
describe "dynamic attributes" do
class DynamicAttributeModel
include Mongoid::Document
include DynamicAttributeSupport
field :defined_field, type: String
end
it "provides dynamic_attribute helper" do
d = DynamicAttributeModel.new(age: 45, defined_field: 'George')
d.dynamic_attributes.should == ['age']
end
it "has static attributes" do
d = DynamicAttributeModel.new(foo: 'bar')
d.static_attributes.should include('defined_field')
d.static_attributes.should_not include('foo')
end
it "allows creation with dynamic attributes" do
d = DynamicAttributeModel.create(age: 99, blood_type: 'A')
d = DynamicAttributeModel.find(d.id)
d.age.should == 99
d.blood_type.should == 'A'
d.dynamic_attributes.should == ['age', 'blood_type']
end
end

Answer 2

this will give you only the dynamic field names for a given record x:
dynamic_attribute_names = x.attributes.keys - x.fields.keys
if you use additional Mongoid features, you need to subtract the fields associated with those features:
e.g. for Mongoid::Versioning :
dynamic_attribute_names = (x.attributes.keys - x.fields.keys) - ['versions']
To get the key/value pairs for only the dynamic attributes:
make sure to clone the result of attributes(), otherwise you modify x !!
attr_hash = x.attributes.clone #### make sure to clone this, otherwise you modify x !!
dyn_attr_hash = attr_hash.delete_if{|k,v| ! dynamic_attribute_names.include?(k)}
or in one line:
x.attributes.clone.delete_if{|k,v| ! dynamic_attribute_names.include?(k)}

Answer 3

So, what I ended up doing is this. I'm not sure if it's the best way to go about it, but it seems to give me the results I'm looking for.
class Order
def dynamic_attributes
self.attributes.delete_if { |attribute|
self.fields.keys.member? attribute
}
end
end
Attributes appears to be a list of the actual attributes on the object, while fields appears to be a hash of the fields that were predefined. Couldn't exactly find that in the documentation, but I'm going with it for now unless someone else knows of a better way!

Answer 4

try .methods or .instance_variables

Answer 5

Not sure if I liked the clone approach, so I wrote one too. From this you could easily build a hash of the content too. This merely outputs it all the dynamic fields (flat structure)
(d.attributes.keys - d.fields.keys).each {|a| puts "#{a} = #{d[a]}"};

Answer 6

I wasn't able to get any of the above solutions to work (as I didn't want to have to add slabs and slabs of code to each model, and, for some reason, the attributes method does not exist on a model instance, for me. :/), so I decided to write my own helper to do this for me. Please note that this method includes both dynamic and predefined fields.
helpers/mongoid_attribute_helper.rb:
module MongoidAttributeHelper
def self.included(base)
base.extend(AttributeMethods)
end
module AttributeMethods
def get_all_attributes
map = %Q{
function() {
for(var key in this)
{
emit(key, null);
}
}
}
reduce = %Q{
function(key, value) {
return null;
}
}
hashedResults = self.map_reduce(map, reduce).out(inline: true) # Returns an array of Hashes (i.e. {"_id"=>"EmailAddress", "value"=>nil} )
# Build an array of just the "_id"s.
results = Array.new
hashedResults.each do |value|
results << value["_id"]
end
return results
end
end
end
models/user.rb:
class User
include Mongoid::Document
include MongoidAttributeHelper
...
end
Once I've added the aforementioned include (include MongoidAttributeHelper) to each model which I would like to use this method with, I can get a list of all fields using User.get_all_attributes.
Granted, this may not be the most efficient or elegant of methods, but it definitely works. :)