Where is the best location to put a plain old Ruby class in a Rails application? I'm not sure if it should go in the helper, model, or controller folder or should I create another folder to handle Ruby classes.
In the /lib folder is fine.
The question really is, what purpose does it serve? Is it data-like stuff? model for that. Is it a helper class that adds functionality to other classes or is a utility? Probably lib. Etc...
It would help to know what your class is trying to accomplish, but in general /lib is a decent enough location.
Related
I am currently coding an application in Ruby that does some simple external API calls to Soundcloud's API.
I have developed a bunch of code inside a single .rb file and want to put this into the rails architecture. This Ruby file has the following classes:
class SoundcloudUser
class SoundcloudQuery
class SoundcloudFollowers
Currently I understand that I can put these classes into seperate .rb files, and then just put them into the /models/ folder which then gives me the ability to call these classes from elsewhere in my rails application (using require/include).
My question is simply, is this the correct way to go about this? I am familiar with rails, but I am new to transferring a Ruby developed project into the rails format. I tried searching best practices for this in the Ruby style guide but I didn't really find anything.
On a side note - I wanted to also create another class that acts as a ?service? wherein in checks my local database if an entry already exists in the database, and if not, then it will query new data. My side-question here would be similar - where would this .rb file for this 'service' live?
I hope I explained my question clearly enough, if not, I am happy to add some clarifications. Thank you for your time!
If in Rails, you can put them in either lib/ or somewhere in the main app directory. For example, you can create app/services and put them inside there, and when you restart the Rails server you should be able to call SoundcloudUser (provided you name them app/services/soundcloud_user.rb.
I always look at the Gitlab source code for this. It's a gigantic Rails app but look at this file: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/app/services/gravatar_service.rb. Because it's inside an app/services (any name actually), GravatarService can be called from anywhere in Rails. If you want to have some namespacing, you have to put it in app/services/soundcloud/user.rb or lib/soundcloud/user.rb and name the class Soundcloud::User.
For the class that acts as a service, it seems like it orchestrates the logic of "check if (song?) exists, else scrape. Some people put it in a model class, I'd probably put it in a service class a la the Gitlab source code. Hope I helped.
Is there any way to package your code by feature in rails? I would like to structure my project so that each feature has its controllers, jobs, mailers, layouts and helpers in its own folder. e.g.
app
----user
--------jobs
--------controllers
--------mailers
--------layouts
--------helpers
----company
--------jobs
--------controllers
--------mailers
--------layouts
--------helpers
where user and company are seperate features.
I've done this in my app and its pretty easy.
You create your file structure the way you want it and then you just put config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/app/user/jobs) or whatever other subdirectory you want into your application.rb folder.
People might say this is not the rails way but I feel your pain when your project gets really big and hard to navigate.
Checkout Trailblazer gem. It is an extension on the basic MVC pattern.
What are the reasons putting a module in /helpers over the /lib folder in a RoR app?
Are /helpers more controller specific, while the /lib is more general in nature?
I think this is a good question because the MVC notion makes us forget that it's all really just metaphors for us to organize code so we don't get too mixed up. If you need to do some simple formating go with a helper, otherwise probably a module in /lib.
Helpers are strictly for defining methods that you want available in your views. /lib modules can be used for anything and are available throughout the application.
I want to store a path for a special directory used by my Rails application. Should I store that in environment.rb, or is there another place this is meant to go?
THE_DIRECTORY_PATH = '/path/to/directory'
Let's assume my controllers + models or libraries in /lib need access as well.
How about storing it in a YAML configuration file that gets loaded by an initializer? This Railscast has the details.
Use a robust YAML-file approach that allows per-environment settings. Try app_config, which has loads of great features, including referring syntax like AppConfig.the_directory_path.
If controllers need access to it, then a better place would be the ApplicationController.
I am creating a plugin which involves a controller, model & views. while i can move these files from the vendor/plugin directory to app/controllers, models & views respectively.
now i can run my controller & model just by copying them in lib folder of vendor/plugins/plugin_name/lib and they are directly accessible, but my views are not initialized from there, so i need a technique which can make my views in vendor/plugins/plugin_name/lib/views accessible to rails framework without copying.
i am trying to add them to actionview, but not sure how to do that.
please guide me on this.
There's ways you can add your plugin's views directory to the "search path" for ActionView, but the easiest way to handle all this is to just use something like the Rails Engines plugin to do all the hard work for you.
If you're looking to add models, views and controllers via a plugin, take a look at Desert: http://github.com/pivotal/desert. I'm not too keen on this approach, but Desert seems to work for people who like it.