Named instances for ActiveRecord

For a project that I'm working on at my day job, we have a governmental client for which we are building a pretty large and complicated online/offline Ruby on Rails application. As part of this app there are tons of data-specific rules. For example, if a client with HIV is being assessed then certain fields may have to be displayed/hidden and there are rules that get applied differently. So lets say you have the following setup:

	class Client < ActiveRecord::Base
	has_many :diagnoses
	end
	class Diagnosis < ActiveRecord::Base
	belongs_to :client
	end

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Now, somewhere in your code you want to be able to do take a specific action only if that client has a particular diagnosis. Without named_instances you might do something like:

	@client.diagnoses.include?(Diagnosis.find_by_name("HIV"))
	# or, worse
	@client.diagnoses.detect {|diagnosis| diagnosis.id == 42 }

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With named_instances you can do the following faster and more concise code:

@client.diagnoses.include? Diagnosis.get(:hiv)

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We've been using this functionality for about 6 months now and its been great. The gem is out on GemCutter (which rocks) and the repo is at GitHub. Hopefully it will be useful in your projects. Comments, criticisms, and patches welcome.