How to get activerecord associations via reflection

Question

For normal columns, you can get at them via the columns class method. However, associations may be named something quite different if the foreign_key

Answer 1

For future Googlers in Rails 4 the answer would now be:

Post.reflections[:comments].foreign_key # => "message_id"

Taken from here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/15364743/2167965

EDIT:

reflections, as of 4.2, now takes strings instead of symbols which is a fun bug to track down. If you want to keep using symbols you should switch to reflect_on_association(:assoc_name). Also note reflections are actually the public api which will keep reporting things like HABTM, even though it's all has many through under the hood. The reflections Rails is actually using are now in _reflections