Rails - Apr 2006 - polymorphic association with single model as target

Hi,

I''m new to rails/ruby and not a sw programmer in the first place.

I''d like to use polymorphic associations to create tags/marks into 
several dictionary tables (i.e japanese to english and japanese to 
french) that share the same model. In that model I introduced a :target 
field to select the database in a find query, i.e:

  def self.find(*args)
    for i in args
      if i.class == Hash then
        #i.each { |key, value| logger.info "#{key} is #{value}"}
        target = i.delete :target
      end
    end
    ... process table name base on target and call set_table_name
    super
  end

The model that contain the marks to the dictionary entries is defined 
like this:
  belongs_to :ref, :polymorphic => true

I use the ref_id as foreign key (as in all the examples) and ref_type as 
INTEGER with a number defining the dictionary I''d like to refer too.

Doing the "joins" myself as in the exemple below works well.

    @marks_en = DbDict.find(:all,
               :target => DBDICT_EN_TYPE,
               :joins => "as db inner join marks as ma on ma.ref_id = 
db.id",
               :conditions => "ma.ref_type = " +
DBDICT_EN_TYPE.to_s)

Doing a call to something like:

    @mark = Mark.find(params[:id]).ref

Does not work.  I clearly understand that this will not work out of the 
box, what I would like to know is how and where do I have to override 
the "ref" method to get this to work ?
Is that possible at all or am I trying to force something that''s not 
intended to be done this way ?


Any ideas highly appreciated!

Thanks
 StefanS

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