Translate Legacy Attribute Names

Recently I’ve been working a lot with legacy databases, wrapping them with rails apps and exposing them to REST actions. One thing that annoyed me was the terribly inconsistent column naming conventions I came across. So I used alias_attribute to give them nicer names, but when it came to running to_xml on the models I found I needed to specify which attributes to leave out and use the alias’s instead. Not so dry. So this is what I came up with:

class Candidate < Legacy::Base
  set_table_name  'CandidateData'
  set_primary_key 'Fileno'

  @@translations = {
    'Fileno'     => 'id',
    'Familyname' => 'last_name',
    'GivenNames' => 'first_name',
    'DOB'        => 'date_of_birth',
    'Emailaddr'  => 'email',
    'Address'    => 'address',
    'City'       => 'city',
    'State'      => 'state',
    'PostCode'   => 'postal_code',
    'PhoneHome'  => 'phone_home',
    'PhoneWork'  => 'phone_work',
    'mobile'     => 'phone_mobile'
  }

  @@translations.each {|k,v| alias_attribute(v, k)}

  alias_method :ar_to_xml, :to_xml

  def to_xml(options = {}, &block)
    default_options = {
      :except  => @@translations.keys,
      :methods => @@translations.values
    }
    self.ar_to_xml(options.merge(default_options), &block)
  end

Also you only have to translate the attributes that need it as they will come through to to_xml as normal if not included in the translation hash.