From e32bb17992b2886872158c7c9345588a5d08c660 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: JamesFerguson <james.ferguson7@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:35:20 +1000
Subject: [PATCH] Cover element ... :attributes => {...} in the README

---
 .gitignore |  1 +
 README.md  | 34 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 35 insertions(+)

diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore
index f8dffe3..e79ab55 100644
--- a/.gitignore
+++ b/.gitignore
@@ -3,3 +3,4 @@ doc/*
 pkg/*
 tags
 .rvmrc
+.idea
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 51e006f..05d5fe1 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -219,6 +219,40 @@ Attributes are absolutely the same as `element` or `has_many`
 Again, you can omit the tag if the attribute accessor symbol matches the name of the attribute.
 
 
+### Attributes On Elements
+
+    <feed xml:lang="en-US" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
+      <id>tag:all-the-episodes.heroku.com,2005:/tv_shows</id>
+      <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://all-the-episodes.heroku.com"/>
+      <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://all-the-episodes.heroku.com/tv_shows.atom"/>
+      <title>TV Shows</title>
+      <updated>2011-07-10T06:52:27Z</updated>
+    </feed>
+
+In this case you would need to map an element to a new Link class just to access its attributes, except that there is an alternate syntax. Instead of
+
+    class Feed
+    # ....
+      has_many :links, Link, :tag => 'link', :xpath => '.'
+    end
+
+    class Link
+      include HappyMapper
+
+      attribute :rel, String
+      attribute :type, String
+      attribute :href, String
+    end
+
+You can drop the Link class and simply replace the has_many on Feed with
+
+    element :link, String, :single => false, :attributes => { :rel => String, :type => String, :href => String }
+
+You can omit the :single => false for elements that only occur once under their parent.
+
+This syntax is most appropriate for elements (with attributes but no content) that only occur at only one level of the heirarchy. If `<feed>` contained another element that also contained a `<link>` (as most atom feeds do) it would be DRY-er to use the first syntax, with a separate `Link` class.
+
+
 ## Class composition
 
 Our address has a country and that country element has a code. Up until this point we neglected it as we declared a `country` as being a `String`.