2.3 and Models in subdirectories

rubyonrails-core
1

Apologies if this is hard to follow.

Previous to Rails 2.3, we have been placing models in subdirectories for organizational purposes, following the suggestions in http://m.onkey.org/2007/12/9/namespaced-models, and setting:

<code> config.load_paths += Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/models/[a-z]*"] </

The models are not namespaced, so e.g. app/models/foos/foo.rb defines "Foo", not "Foos::Foo". FWIW, we have avoided namespacing our models due to numerous posts that state it is buggy, and from our own experiences of the same.

This worked OK, except for two issue: (1) we would occasionally get "Expected app/models/foos/foo.rb to define Foos::Foo", and (2) models in subdirectories loaded like this would not auto-reload in development mode after they were changed.

First, we fixed (1) by explicitly loading each file with the 3rd code sample (see below), but it didn't fix (2). So we managed to fix both with this bit of code (from http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/124830#633802) to get around that issue, placed at the bottom of application.rb

<code> model_folders = %w(foos bars bazs) for folder in model_folders do Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/models/{folder}/*.rb"].each { |file|   require_dependency "{folder}/#{file[file.rindex('/') + 1...-3]}" } end </code>

So with both of these, we were able to load models in directories other than app/models reliably, and also have them auto-reload changes in development mode. However, with Rails 2.3.1 RC2 this strategy is no longer working. The 2nd code segment does not seem to reliably load model classes in subdirectories, again resulting in errors similar to: "Expected app/models/foos/foo.rb to define Foos::Foo" on the 2nd and subsequent request.

If we remove the 2nd code segment above, and replace it with this 3rd code segment to explicitly load each file, a suggestion from this post (http://www.paperplanes.de/2007/5/2/ namespacing_your_rails_model_an.html)

<code> [ "app/models" ].each do |path|   Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/#{path}/**/*.rb"].each do |file|     load file   end end </code>

the errors go away, but again we are left without being able to auto- reload those models in development mode, so changes to those models require restarting the application (we are running on Passenger) which takes away one of the nicest features of doing Rails development IMHO.

Would appreciate any suggestions for being able to have our cake and eat it too. Life was better before trying to organize our models into subdirectories.

Thanks,

Michael

2

This turned out to be a bug in our code base. We had the require_dependency section in environment.rb and not application_controller.rb. Not clear to me yet, why it belongs in application_controller.rb, but that was the instructions per the original blog post. The change to Rails 2.3 had some impact on this.

Previous to Rails 2.3, we have been placing models in subdirectories for organizational purposes, following the suggestions inhttp://m.onkey.org/2007/12/9/namespaced-models, and setting:

<code> config.load_paths += Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/models/[a-z]*"] </ >

So we managed to fix both