Variable length path associations

[cheerfulstoic]

• Support for returning either the last element in the path or the entire path
• Support for defining min/max path length

[cheerfulstoic]

Proposed syntax:

has_many :out, :name, :type, variable: true

has_many :out, :name, :type, variable: {min: 1, max: 5}

[cheerfulstoic]

Could call as:

object.name.to_a # To get objects at the end
object.name.to_paths # To get the paths

object.name_path # To get path for `has_one`

The QueryProxy#to_paths could even work in general, perhaps, though we'd need to build one long path as opposed to building each step as a separate part of the MATCH

It would also be cool to find a way to turn this into a hierarchy of objects in an eager-loading fashion with just the one query

[samis]

Would this work so that you could start from one object and find the path to another object using an association like this one?

[cheerfulstoic]

Yeah, it should. Associations return QueryProxy objects (more or less, there's a branch in the works) and QueryProxy responds to the #match_to method, so you'd be able to say:

  source_object.variable_association_name.match_to(target_object).to_paths