Organizing Models in Rails without Namespacing
June 25, 2009 4 Comments
I was doing some code cleanup and noticed we have over 50 models in our models directory. Not good. The first thing I thought was to add namespacing. I googled the topic and turns out namespacing models is a bad idea because of how Rails collapses the model namespaces. Adding sub directories is a better and cleaner solution. Read Josh Susser’s post on the topic.
To use sub directories, you must add the directories to Rails’ config.load_paths in your environment.rb
config.load_paths << "#{Rails.root}/app/models/profile"
To make this more flexible, you can use this snippet to add all sub directories:
#Add all sub directories in models to load paths
Dir.entries("#{Rails.root}/app/models").each do |file|
next if file.eql?('.') || file.eql?('..')
full_path = "#{Rails.root}/app/models/#{file}"
config.load_paths << full_path if File.directory?(full_path)
end
About tommychheng
Hi tommy,
I’m using Rails 2.3.2 and seems that there is no way to make work the snippet…
Rails wants that I define namespaces for all the classes in the subdirectory…is there another config to do?
Thanks,
Nicola.
Hi Nicola,
What is your folder structure for your models folder?
What did you add to your environment.rb file?
By now I have only a single folder (“item”) with all classes (STI included) .
Talking about environment.rb I’ve tried with your (and others) generic version, now with this simple statement:
config.load_paths += %W( #{RAILS_ROOT}/app/models/item )
but nothing seems work…
Very strange!
My guess is that there could be a typo, config.load_paths = ITEM here
You can do a puts config.load_paths at the end of the environment.rb and check the console to see if the folders are being added.