About a month ago I ran into a case where I needed to know if an AR object's association exists dynamically. I was building a CMS Engine. I thought maybe this was a one off, but last week I found out my co-worker also had a need for this in the CMS he was building. So I've come to the community to see if this is something we think should be added into ActiveRecord. I originally solved for this quite naively with the following solution def is_association?(attribute) respond_to?(attribute) && !attribute_names.include?(attribute.to_s) end and after trying to actually solve it in ActiveRecord I discovered reflections. I think this is easily solved with something like the following method inside lib/active_record/assocations.rb or lib/active_record/relation.rb def has_association?(name) reflections.include? name end I'm new to contributing to open source and have been developing with Rails for about a year so any and all questions, comments, criticism is welcome. Thanks! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-core+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-core@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.