In several places in a rather complex Rails app there are references to a particular kind of object; let’s call them “apples”. I’d like to change all of these user-facing references from “apples” to “oranges”. This would be simple enough, except that I’d like to retain Apple as class, so I don’t want to touch the myriad methods, variables, symbols, etc. that use the word “apple”.
There are several orders of magnitude more instances of apple in the code proper than there are user-facing instances of “apple”. My question is: How can I zero in on the relatively few displayed instances? Is there a way to perform a search on all and only what is displayed by a browser?
Unless you’ve taken a disciplined approach to separate your language from your code, such as using localization files, then no, there’s no easy way to find instances of displayed text. How is a search supposed to differentiate between
'apple'used as a type column and'apple'inserted into a page?This is why you might want to take an approach where you don’t embed language in your controllers and models. Instead you could create a helper method to describe them for you:
That method, if constructed properly, would render
'10 apples'or whatever term you’d like to use for that type of object.