Question

I’ve written a rails app that follows the regular directory structure (model code in models, controller code in controllers).

But I’m now working on a new feature and for that I have written some (what I would call) ‘service’ code.
The new feature is to import some data into the system, at the moment it’s two classes to do the importing but could expand to more.

I don’t believe the new code belongs in model as it’s not modelling any object (it’s not directly related to any single object either. I certainly don’t think it belongs in controller either as it’s not presentation logic.

So, I’ve created a ‘app/services’ directory and put it in there. I’ve also created a ‘test/services’ directory where I have put my tests.

All well and good I thought but when I run ‘rake:test’ or ‘autotest’ my new services tests are not run.
Now I expect there is a way to make rake pick them up but is this a warning flag that I have done something wrong?
Is there some other place the code should live or am I somehow not doing things ‘the Rails way’?

Generally whenever I’ve hit a problem like this before I’ve usually found that rails had a solution already, but I was not aware of the convention. Is this one of those cases?

Answer 1

This is what the ‘lib’ folder is for.

The lib folder is in the automatically looked up path, so you can have

class MyFoo end 

in lib/my_foo.rb and then just by calling

MyFoo.new 

from a controller the code will be loaded without you needing a require 'my_foo'