Where to put require 'gem' statements?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello,

I've seen all sorts of places where people put their 'require' statements, and I'm not sure what the best solution is. I'm currently using it directly in a model/csv_processor.rb:

  require 'fastercsv'

  class CsvProcessor     def self.create_csv_table(file)       ...       FCSV.parse(...       ...   end

I'm calling this from controllers/loader_controller.db:

  my_csv_table = CsvProcessor.create_csv_table(params[:file_ref])

Works perfectly. But generally, where is the place to put all those require statements? Is it in config/environment.rb? Would it be correct to add them just at the end of this file?

I already tried this with another "processor", which needs the ruby-plsql gem. So I added at the end of environment.rb the statements:

  require 'ruby-plsql'   plsql.activerecord_class = ActiveRecord::Base   plsql.connection.autocommit = false

But this didn't work. I couldn't start webrick anymore. Having instead the same statements at the beginning of model/plsql_processor.rb works without problems.

Any help would be appreciated,

Martin

2

Works perfectly. But generally, where is the place to put all those require statements? Is it in config/environment.rb? Would it be correct to add them just at the end of this file?

Well if it's a gem then using config.gem inside config/environment.rb is usually the way to go. You don't want to just stick things at the bottom of environment.rb - in production mode your app's code gets loaded before the bottom of environment.rb gets executed. If you put stuff in an initializer (ie in a file in config/initializers) then it will get run early enough.

Fred