Question

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Ruby on Rails: Where to define global constants?

I am interested in doing this the “Rails Way” on a new application. I would also like to refer to constants in some sort of context to make the code more readable. I have an application where a user can request access to another users’s data set. This AccessRequest can have one of the following statuses:

Review
Denied
Approved

I can see these values being used in reporting features in the future, so I want to make them constants in order to avoid any spelling or capitalization issues. I thought I would just put these in a constants.rb file in the config/initializers directory.

I would like to refer to these as AccessRequest::REVIEW. Since I already have a model called AccessRequest, does it make sense to put them there? Or wrap them in a class in a constants.rb file in the config/initializers directory? Which way is the Rails Way?

Answer 1

You don’t need to use constants in Rails 3.It is better to use the Rails::Application singleton.

In your application.rb you can define your constante like:

module Yourapp
  class Application < Rails::Application

    config.access_request.review = 'xxx'
  end
end

After in your code you can call

Yourapp::Application.config.access_request.review

After if you change value in each environment, You just define the config.xx in your config/environments/production.rb or other environment.