Many-to-many relationships with Ruby, Redis, and Ohm

Question

I'm attempting to create a many-to-many relationship in Redis using Ohm. As an example, I have Book and Author models defined as follows:

class Book < Ohm::Model
  attribute :title
  set :authors, Author
end

class Author < Ohm::Model
  attribute :last_name
  attribute :first_name
  set :books, Book
end

What I would like to be able to do is leverage Ohm's indexing capabilities to do finds such as:

require 'test_helper'

class ManyToManyRelationshipTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase

  setup do
    @dave_thomas = FactoryGirl.build(:dave_thomas)
    @andy_hunt = FactoryGirl.build(:andy_hunt)
    @chad_fowler = FactoryGirl.build(:chad_fowler)

    @pick_axe = FactoryGirl.build(:pick_axe)
    @pick_axe.authors << @dave_thomas 
    @pick_axe.authors << @andy_hunt
    @pick_axe.authors << @chad_fowler

    @thinking_and_learning = FactoryGirl.build(:pragmatic_thinking_and_learning)
    @thinking_and_learning.authors << @andy_hunt
  end

  test "find a Book by Author" do
    assert Book.find(:author_id => @andy_hunt.id).include?(@pick_axe)
    assert Book.find(:author_id => @andy_hunt.id).include?(@thinking_and_learning)
  end

  test "find Authors by Book" do
    assert Author.find(:book_id => @pick_axe.id).include?(@dave_thomas)
    assert Author.find(:book_id => @pick_axe.id).include?(@andy_hunt)
    assert Author.find(:book_id => @pick_axe.id).include?(@chad_fowler)
  end
end

With the code above, I get the following Exception: Ohm::Model::IndexNotFound: Index :author_id not found. (when trying to find Books given an author)

I've tried to build custom indices as described here: http://ohm.keyvalue.org/examples/tagging.html, and here: http://pinoyrb.org/ruby/ohm-inside-tricks

Unfortunately, it looks like the index is built when the model is first created, which means the Set is empty (because, if I understand correctly, Sets are unusable in Ohm until the model has been assigned an ID).

I really appreciate any help or suggestions!

Answer 1

The solution in this case is a bit less automatic:

require "ohm"

class Book < Ohm::Model
  attr_accessor :authors

  attribute :title

  index :authors
end

class Author < Ohm::Model
  attribute :name
end

###

require "test/unit"

class BooksTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  def test_books_by_author
    dave = Author.create(name: "Dave")
    andy = Author.create(name: "Andy")
    dhh = Author.create(name: "DHH")

    pickaxe = Book.create(title: "Pickaxe", authors: [dave.id, andy.id])

    assert_equal pickaxe, Book.find(authors: dave.id).first
    assert_equal pickaxe, Book.find(authors: andy.id).first

    assert_equal nil, Book.find(authors: dhh.id).first
  end
end

Makes sense?