Question

I am developing a Ruby on Rails website and I have an ‘architectural’ question : my application needs some parameters and I’m wondering where to store them.

In concrete terms, my application receive some requests which are evaluated and then sent. So, the Request model must have attributes concerning these treatments : a validation status and a sending status. For instance, validation status can be ‘accepted‘, ‘rejected‘ or ‘waiting‘. Sending status can be ‘sent‘, ‘waiting‘, ‘error during sending‘ or stuff like that. I have to store those status codes parameters somewhere, but I don’t know what is the best solution.

I could create a model for each one and store them in the database (and having an active record model ValidationStatus for instance) but : wouldn’t it be a bite excessive to create a database/model for storing data like that?

I could also just use them in the code without ‘storing’ them, I could store them in a YAML file…

So, a more simpler question: how do you deal with your application parameters in RoR?

Answer 1

There are lots of global configuration plugins, most of them revolve around the idea of loading a YAML file at some point. Check this page, this plugin and even this Railscast.