Frequently WTFed WTFs

[Betsy_Haibel]

This topic collects patterns in existing WTFs. If you’re seeing patterns I’m not, please note them in the comments!

Sprockets/Webpacker division of responsibilities is confusing

App/javascript feels like the wrong name for that directory

This has my vote as well. It makes a lot of sense in a SPA, maybe less so with javascript sprinkles.

Sprockets abandonment

I think this would be a good candidate for its own WTF topic so it doesn’t get buried in this one.

Rails is omakase until it isn’t – not enough pattern guidance

Sprockets abandonment

I think this would be a good candidate for its own WTF topic so it doesn’t get buried in this one.

App/javascript feels like the wrong name for that directory

This has my vote as well. It makes a lot of sense in a SPA, maybe less so with javascript sprinkles.

An extensive example of project organization

Rails has documentation that states that a new instance of a Controller is created for every request. What seems to be lacking in the documentation is how Rails decides to spawn other types of classes. With the rising popularity (I think?) of Rails developers utilizing POROs and implementing a Service layer, it seems important to give some pointers on how those classes are initialized. This depends on a bunch of things, like multi-threaded or multi-process app server, and how the app server mi…

Helping devs understand concerns faster

A concern does not have syntatic sugar per se, like the Hotel::Pricing module above. The syntatic sugar is a feature of AS::Concern, different.

Hard to understand when AR runs queries & how to avoid extra queries

The method to_a is not an intuitive way to force ActiveRecord to not re-query the db when accessing a collection of child objects

Or perhaps aliasing to_a with something like run_query There’s load, which does approximately that. Specifically, load is the operation that various other things, including to_a, trigger when they actually need the records to be present. Unlike to_a, load returns self, so you still have a Relation that answers to all the extra methods; to_a follows the Ruby convention and converts the vaguely-array-ish Relation collection object into a totally standard Ruby Array. (Some of these things m…

N+1 Queries should be the exception, not the easy trap to fall in

Not sure if this solves what you’re looking for, but I was excited to see it get merged. I’d love it on by default. https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/37400

Enum design has weird edges & is sometimes hard to use correctly

Enums use integer keys

Yep, agreed on this one!

Enums - inconsistent

I think one of the strong aims behind ActiveRecord enums is to define an interface that decouples your application’s understanding of that field and the raw value in the database. The raw value could be a string, it could be a number, or it could be a database native enum which may not be represented well in Rails. So let’s assume we have a status field which uses the following values for some arcane technical reason: [ 213123, // normal 238129, // special 989342 // extra_special ] How …

Rails should make authentication omakase

Admin framework by default

I’m sure I’m not the first guy asking about this, why doesn’t Rails come with an admin framework by default, something of the sort Django has? This will probably require adding some authentication mechanism to the framework as well, which might as well be Devise since so many Rails apps use it anyway. We’ve added cool stuff to the framework like ActionCable and ActionText and ActionMailbox, which usually start as a pain point solved in BaseCamp and then extracted to the framework. There is usual…

ActiveAuthentication

Rails tried to solve a lot of problems out of the box, but every project I’ve ever seen has authentication. There is, of course, devise but having user management, authentication, OTP and so on baked in would, in my opinion, be more beneficial than ActionStorage.

[wwahammy (Eric Schultz)]

Just wanted to give a very big thank you to @Betsy_Haibel. We’re totally in your debt for all the amazing work you’ve done on this topic.