Informal schema being enforced by properties about couch_potato

[langalex]

you are completely correct. one way to handle this with the current couch potato is to override the User.json_create method which would not be very elegant though. providing a hash like syntax for properties not defined on the class sounds like a good idea though.

[langalex]

on the other hand... when you think about your object model, why would you want to have access to attributes that according to your class are not there. you could just as well declare the name as another property...

[sporkd]

Yes, I agree. It does get a little too meta programmy taken to that extreme, unless you are also saving older views and logic that goes with the old properties. Probably the main feature here I see valuable is being able to add a property at runtime, which I believe can be done on the class level with couch_potato.

Here is an example of where this would be useful...
http://merbist.com/2009/05/17/couchdb-with-couchrest-in-5-minutes/#comment-645

[langalex]

maybe it makes sense to do something like this in an extra module that has to be included in addition to the Persistence module for cases where you want this behavior. if you wanna write this i'd be happy to include it.

[langalex]

another solution for the cms problem (allow users to have custom fields): create a property called custom_fields on your model and make that a hash that contains the custom fields. this way you would also avoid naming collisions with other properties.