'require' in lib code not evaluated twice in development mode?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a model that does an 'include' of a module defined in the lib directory. The module, in turn, uses 'require' to load a class defined in the system load path. Running the application in development mode, the initial request goes through successfully. However, the second time around, I get a NameError resulting from "uninitialized constant", with the constant in question being a class that is defined in the script that is 'require'd in the lib module. In brief it looks like this:

app/model/revision.rb: class Revision    include MyLib::Mod end

lib/my_lib/mod.rb: module MyLib   module Mod     require 'extension/clazz'   end end

On the second request, the class defined in extension/clazz cannot be found, resulting in the NameError. However, if I add "require 'extension/clazz'" into the model, just before the 'include', it works such that every request is successful. Likewise, if I run the applicaiton in production mode, it works every time.

Is this expected behavior, or is this a bug in Rails?

Thanks

n

2

Being new to Rails, it's no surprise I didn't understand what was happening. So the scripts in the lib directory are only evaluated once. While I knew that, I kinda forgot when faced with this problem. Given that in development mode Rails will de-initialize all the constants defined during the request (or something of that nature, again I'm new to Rails), it threw away the classes that were defined within the scripts in the lib directory. And given it never evaluated those scripts again, even in development mode, it didn't reload the classes.

However, a simple work-around of using 'require' on the lib scripts made the problem go away. So the model contains the following (where the 'Mod' module is defined in the script lib/my_lib/mod.rb):

require 'my_lib/mod' include MyLib::Mod

I don't think this is all that beautiful, but maybe someday I'll learn the proper way to do this.

n