[PATCH]Using inspect on a new object's association resets the association

Ups, hit submit instead of preview, sorry.

Looking inside the inspect method you can see

reload unless loaded?

and then reload does

reset
load_target

Since using build does not set loaded (opposed to <<) the associations is reset and being a new object, nothing gets loaded.

To see it in action (with bar has_many foos):

bar = Bar.new
bar.foos.build
bar.foos.size # => 1
bar.foos.inspect # => []
bar.foos.size # => 0

The patch extends the condition to reload inside inspect to take this case into account.

+1

Second patch with a couple of minor changes:

Removed accented letter from test (showed strange characters if seen in the site).

The condition resulting from the patch is the negation of the one in load_target, but using unless instead of if, so both are exactly the same. I factored it out to its own method

needs_to_be_loaded?

This way it's a bit more descriptive and DRY.

I think that line in inspect is flawed. Even with a conditional there's no reason to reload anything.

You want to inspect the target in memory, loading it if it is not yet there. I think the method needs_to_be_loaded? and its proposed usage in load_target is good. But I'd write inspect

def inspect
  load_target
  @target.inspect
end

That'd be analogous to ===.

Oh, in fact we could even remove that definition of inspect altogether and let it go through method_missing.