>  > Why should this inspire fear?
> 
>  Code injection attack to own a RoR site possibly?  That would be my guess.

Sort of. I'm trying to use it to build a Rails plugin called
acts_as_fox, which overrides every method on a model to return "chunky
bacon!" (It's not really that terrifying, I just kind of had a Dr.
Frankenstein moment, drunk on power type thing.)

Unfortunately, applying Rick's code directly to an ActiveRecord model
doesn't quite accomplish this, because it's missing the superclass
methods, but applying it to ActiveRecord::Base doesn't work either. I
did get it to work by doing it twice, both on the actual model and on
ActiveRecord::Base itself, but that's very unsatisfying, because I
solved the problem by cutting and pasting. (I think I understand why
it worked; ActiveRecord::Base attaches a lot of methods to its
subclasses, instead of having them inherited directly.) It also fails
to really accomplish what I want to do, because it means that making
one model acts_as_fox destroys all the other models. (I also need to
attach a method_missing to return "chunky bacon!" but that part's
obviously trivial.)

Really the quickest way to accomplish this would be to simply pop the
model out of its inheritance hierarchy - redefine the model not to
have any superclass except Object - but I don't know if that's
possible. Trying it in the most obvious way (class Foo < Object; end,
where Foo was already defined Foo < ActiveRecord::Base) results in a
TypeError with the message "superclass mismatch."

But there must be a clean way to open up the class, grab all its
methods, including those derived from superclasses, and simply
reassign them. Something like

Foo.instance_methods(true).each{|m| Foo.instance_eval("alias
:chunky_bacon " + m)}

-- 
Giles Bowkett

Blog: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
Portfolio: http://www.gilesgoatboy.org