Question

In the Rails application I’m currently developing I have many “request” models. We are using a lot of web services and we have a lot of different requests to those services, each of them with their own logic (mostly validations). So they are all grouped in a module as a namespace:

module Request
end

So now every request is something like:

class Request::SendSomeData
end

So far, so good… The thing is that we are going to have a lot of such requests which will share some common logic. It is easy to include the module

class Request::SendSomeData
  include Request
end

… (so it will act both as a namespace and a mixin), but I was wondering if there is a way to make it without the include (as it is going to be some kind of code repetition).

Is there a way for Ruby to put some instance methods to all the classes in a module’s namespace without explicitly including the module?

In other words can I have something like:

module Request
  def someMethod
  end
end

and

class Request::SendSomeData
end

and be able to use

Request::SendSomeData.new.someMethod

at the same time?

Answer 1

What you are asking can’t be done without some evil hackery.

You either have too many classes, or are focusing on an issue that is too unimportant. It’s only one line of code per class.

An alternative is to create a base model class, as I have previously described in another question, but this requires the derived classes to each call set_table_name, so it won’t save you any typing.