Question

I’m working on a gem for a RESTful API, and I noticed that, since it’s a REST api, a lot of the resource urls are the same, and thus a few methods for each class would be the exact same (just the uri path differing).

I started out creating classes like this:

module NameSpace
 Class1 < SuperClass; ... end
end

in various files, would be similarly:

moduel NameSpace
 Class2 < SuperClass; ... end
end

So, here is what I’ve developed so far:

    RESOURCE_NAMES = [
      "Class1",
      "Class2",
       ...
    ]

module NameSpace
 RESOURCE_NAMES.each {|class_name|
     Object.const_set(
        class_name,
        Class.new(SuperClass) do
          CONTROLLER = class_name.downcase

          @attributes = {}

          # class variables
          def self.show(id); ... end
          def self.update(id); ... end
          def self.destroy(id); ... end

        end
     )
  }
end

But when I try to run the console, and require my gem, I get this output:

require "rubygems"

require "mygem"
/home/me/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p371/gems/mygem-0.0.1/lib/mygem/restful_resource.rb:17: warning: already initialized constant CONTROLLER
/home/me/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p371/gems/mygem-0.0.1/lib/mygem/restful_resource.rb:17: warning: already initialized constant CONTROLLER
/home/me/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p371/gems/mygem-0.0.1/lib/mygem/restful_resource.rb:17: warning: already initialized constant CONTROLLER
/home/me/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p371/gems/mygem-0.0.1/lib/mygem/restful_resource.rb:17: warning: already initialized constant CONTROLLER
/home/me/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p371/gems/mygem-0.0.1/lib/mygem/restful_resource.rb:17: warning: already initialized constant CONTROLLER

and when I try to do
> NameSpace::Cass1, I get

 NameError: uninitialized constant NameSpace::Class1

My question is: am I close? How do I properly define dynamic subclassed and namespaced classes?

Answer 1

Setting the CONTROLLER constant using const_set seems to work:

const_set :CONTROLLER, class_name.downcase

For the other problem, you should change Object.const_set( to just const_set(, which will set the constant in your NameSpace module the way you want it.