So, say you’re in a fantasy world, and the rif-raf is beating down your doors…

Or, maybe, you’re trying to write a sane json rendering of your model, and the model has a polymorphic belongs_to.

As a bit of review, let’s start with the easy case. You have some models with a simple association.

class Child < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :parent
end

class Parent < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :children
end

The rabl for a child is pretty easy. In app/views/children/show.rabl you might have:

object @child
attributes :id, :name
child(:parent) { partial "children/parent" }

As it turns out, you’re actually writing an app that’s used to track orphans left behind after UFO visits, so you need to support children of aliens, too. So your models look more like this:

class Child < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :parent, :polymorphic => true
end

class HumanParent < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :children, :as => :parent
end

class AlienParent < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :children, :as => :parent
end

And of course you need to output different information for alien parents (app/views/children/alien_parent.rabl) than for human parents (app/views/children/human_parent.rabl). So your rabl in app/views/children/show.rabl will look more like this:

object @child
attributes :id, :name
code(:parent) { |child|
  partial "children/#{child.parent.class.name.underscore}",
   :object => child.parent
}