Ever need to use structured data that doesn’t need its own database model? Ryan Bates shows you how in a recent Railscast: Non Active Record Model.

If you have more than one non ActiveRecord model, you’ll find yourself starting to duplicate a lot of code. I did recently, so I extracted a bunch of functionality into a plugin called PassiveRecord.

PassiveRecord provides ActiveRecord-like behavior for static, non-database models.

Let’s say you wanted to have a Name object that you could toss around in a nice little package:

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class Name < PassiveRecord
  define_attributes [:first_name, :middle_name, :last_name]
end

@name = Name.new(:first_name => "Dima", :last_name => "Dozen")

Then you could have a Person object that has_many names like this:

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class Person < PassiveRecord
  has_many :names
end

@person = Person.new(:names => [@name])

You can now access the names hash just like you would an ActiveRecord object:

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@person.names #=> [#<Name:0x2031824 @last_name="Dozen", @first_name="Dima">]
@person.names.first.first_name #=> "Dima"

You can serialize a PassiveRecord object into another database object for storage:

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class Address < PassiveRecord
  define_attributes [:street, :city, :state, :postal_code, :country]
end

class Company < ActiveRecord
  serialize :address
end

@company.address = Address.new(:street1 => "123 4th St", :city => "Wellington", :country => "NZ")

Check out PassiveRecord on Github: github.com/artofmission/passive_record