Question

I am getting the following error, when I try to run my application:

uninitialized constant RegistrationsController::User_serial

In my config/application.rb, I have:

config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib)
config.autoload_paths += Dir["#{config.root}/lib/**/"]

In my registrations_controller.rb, I have the following:

class RegistrationsController < Devise::RegistrationsController
  ........

def create
    @user = User.new(params[:user])

    user_serial_local = User_serial.new #initialize class defined in lib/my_tools.rb
    date_time_local = Date_formatter.new
    ......

In lib/my_tools.rb, I define some classes:

class User_serial
  def self.calculate(first,last)
    first_3 = first[0..2]
    last_4 = last[0..3]
    time = Time.now.to_i
    return first_3 + last_4 + time.to_s
  end 
end

class Date_formatter
  def self.datetime
    return Time.now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
  end
end

There are a lot of references to overriding a class, and instructions on how to insure that anything placed in the lib folder is included (followed in my code). Why am I getting the error message?

Answer 1

For rails’ magic loading to work it needs to be able to find the file a class/module is defined in based only on the class name.

This in turn means sticking to rails’ naming conventions and putting things where rails expects: UserSerial should be defined in user_serial.rb. You might be able to get User_serial to work as a class name but rails will never look in my_tools.rb for that class.