Question

I’m working on a Rails 2.1 project that has an ApplicationController similar to the following:

class ApplicationController < ActionController:Base
  THIS_SITE = Site.find_by_url('www.example.net')
  ADMIN_ROLES = StaffRole.find(:all, :conditions => ["site_id = ? AND name IN (?)", ApplicationController::THIS_SITE.id, 'Administrator'])
end

I was unable to run tests, because in my test environment I would get an error saying THIS_SITE is nil when trying to define ADMIN_ROLES. I fixed the issue by doing the following:

class ApplicationController < ActionController:Base
  def self.this_site
    @@this_site ||= Site.find_by_url('www.example.net')
  end
  def self.admin_roles
    @admin_roles ||= StaffRole.find(:all, :conditions => ["site_id = ? AND name IN (?)", ApplicationController::this_site.id, 'Administrator'])
end

ApplicationController::THIS_SITE and ApplicationController::ADMIN_ROLES are used throughout the application in views, controllers, and models. I feel that this is all wrong and dirty. Am I wrong thinking that this is wrong/dirty? If not, how can this be refactored?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Your problem in test mode is that the ApplicationController class gets loaded even before the test database is populated. And while there is no problem with using Constants per se; defining class methods moves the loading from the DB moment a bit into the future and let you run your tests.

I do think, however, that “@@this_site” in your code should probably be “@this_site”.

From a sys-architects point of view both this_site and admin_roles look like per-app settings and should be moved out of the controller parts. A good place to define app-wide settings is below config/initializers or in your environment.rb

BTW: Isn’t Rails 2.1 a bit on the old side?