Question

I’m using rails 3.2.3 with more than 100 models. The thing is that the directory app/models is too crowded. I organized the directory into several groups and add autoload_paths (for the new sub directories). I don’t want my models to use namespace, because it would end up into several namespaces which is not good for development.
Let’s say:

# app/models/listing.rb
class Listing < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :communications
end

# app/models/listing/communication.rb
class Communication < ActiveRecord::Base
end

In my rails console, it works for any models with absolute reference except in the activerecord associations. I cannot call Listing.first.communications. I see what it does it is trying to load Listing::Communication, and it failed out because the content of this file is Communication (without namespace).

LoadError: Expected /home/chamnap/my_app/app/models/listing/communication.rb to define Listing::Communication

Is there a way to group models into directory and use them without namespace? Or is there a way to preload all models so that Rails doesn’t load model on the fly?

Answer 1

There is a problem with models in subdirectories and associations in Rails 3. I also have stumbled upon this.

My solution was to point an explicit :class_name for every association to model in subdirectory, like

class Listing < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :communications, :class_name => "::Communication"
end

Take notice of using “::” before model name — it says to rails that there is no namespace for Communication model.