routing and modules

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have had a similar problem with a heavily moduled application.

Moduling controllers (aka using “Controller Namespaces”) sounds like a good idea, but practically, in current Rails, the whole thing appears

to be implemented as a half-hearted afterthought.

Concrete examples, please.

IIRC at the beginning you would encounter serious bugs with even the most basic uses of controller namespaces. Then those bugs were (afaik) fixed, but you still have some deep issues integrating them with the rest of the Rails kingdom, e.g. the routes issue you raised and several important plugins which simply don’t work with moduled controllers.

What are these deep issues and important plugins?

I’d love to hear from someone more informed than me what’s the current situation with this (rather arcane) aspect of Rails.

Directories correspond to modules. Classes live in files in those directories. No arcane magic lurking here.

My 2 cents:

It doesn’t seem as if the core developers are committed to supporting

controller namespaces. DHH for example explicitly shuns them (see the RailsConf keynote). So the support for this feature, which had lows and highs, is likely to see more lows than highs in the future. IMHO the

Rails core team should decree whether they are Evil, in which case they should be removed to avoid trapping people (and I think they can be a rather nasty trap), or otherwise that controller namespaces are Good,

in which case support for them should improve, e.g. they should be better supported by routes.rb and plugins which break on them should be considered broken.

I’d rather discuss in terms of code and test cases than how DHH seems to you. Rails’ directory/module convention should hold for controllers as well as any other class that the dependencies mechanism autoloads. If you have issues or bugs, report, fix, test, and document them.

jeremy

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Jeremy Kemper wrote:

I have had a similar problem with a heavily moduled application.

Moduling controllers (aka using “Controller Namespaces”) sounds like a good idea, but practically, in current Rails, the whole thing appears to be implemented as a half-hearted afterthought.

Concrete examples, please.

IIRC at the beginning you would encounter serious bugs with even the

most basic uses of controller namespaces. Then those bugs were (afaik)

fixed, but you still have some deep issues integrating them with the rest of the Rails kingdom, e.g. the routes issue you raised and several important plugins which simply don’t work with moduled controllers.

What are these deep issues and important plugins?

Ask and you shall recieve:

http://lists.rubyonrails.org/pipermail/rails/2006-June/047921.html

Could you explain the problem here? I don’t understand the issue or your expectation.

I distinctly recall Engines not working well with controller namespaces for several releases (may have been fixed since then, haven’t followed). I’ve seen ML postings of several other plugins breaking with controller namepaces.

If this is the sum of it, I recommend you use better-tested plugins. Do you have other examples? Otherwise, this smells like you got singed but are proclaiming forest fire.

jeremy

3

Jeremy Kemper wrote:

What are these deep issues and important plugins?

Ask and you shall recieve:

http://lists.rubyonrails.org/pipermail/rails/2006-June/047921.html

Could you explain the problem here? I don’t understand the issue or your expectation.

The problem is that in map.connect , you get the namespace and the controller glued together: a request for controller bar inside namespace foo would set :controller to be ‘foo/bar’. There’s no way to seperate the two in routes.rb.

The entire path is the controller. You’re asking for a different way of looking at controller paths.

This problem prevented me from accomplishing a very specific task: reroute all requests from ‘foo/’ to ‘baz/’. As there was simply no way to get the controller and namespace as seperate

components, there was no way to say in routes.rb: “take every request to a controller in namespace foo and redirect it to a controller with the same name in namespace baz”.

This is a pretty obtuse requirement predicated on the above assumption about controller paths. An httpd-level rewrite is well-suited to big changes to the URL space like this: Redirect permanent /foo /bar

Do you have other examples? Otherwise, this smells like you got singed but are

proclaiming forest fire.

The reality is that I came to regret using controller namespaces. They bit me with similar problems to the one OP experienced. They broke some plugins, which worked fine without them. And eventually I was bitten by

the rerouting shortcomings which for me were the last straw. After that, I stopped namespacing controllers altogether, and used only root level controllers.

Over more than several months of Rails experience, controller

namespaces proved to engender a lot more trouble than they solved, and require a lot more pain and effort than they saved. I find this to be a good enough reason to warn newbies against them.

I’m sorry to hear that; I hope we can address the other problems you experienced. Please open tickets for each if you remember what they were.

jeremy