Question

You can see everything in the file structure at github.com/ddd1600/simple_angel

I’m getting alot of errors while trying to create a ruby application (soon to be a gem) “the correct way”, viz. by thoroughly dividing the logic into classes and “loader files” and all of that. Point is, I know how to do this code the simpler way, without obeying OO principles, but I want to do it “correctly”.

So, first of all, the file structure is as follows—

root folder = ~/Develop/simple_angel

inside /simple_angel
  - /lib
  - Gemfile
  - Rakefile
  - simple_angel.gemspec

inside /lib
  - simple_angel.rb
  - /simple_angel

inside /lib/simple_angel
  - company.rb
  - search.rb
  - version.rb

But, here are some basics.

Here is what I’m calling to run this program from the terminal (PATH when running is ~/Develop/simple_angel)

ruby -Ilib lib/simple_angel/search.rb

Here is search.rb

#these 'requires' are supposed to be loaded in lib/simple_angel.rb, so here I show
#them commented out
#
#require 'rubygems'
#require 'httparty'
#require 'json'
#require 'company'

module SimpleAngel
  class Search

  SEARCH_URL = "http://api.angel.co/1/startups"

  def search(user_input)

    response = HTTParty.get("#{SEARCH_URL}/#{user_input}")
    parsed_response = JSON.parse(response.body)

    Company.new(parsed_response)

  end
 end  

 s = SimpleAngel::Search.new
 s = Search.new
 x = s.search(6702)
 p x
 end

Here is the “loader” file, lib/simple_angel.rb (PS: what is a more formal title for this sort of file?)

require 'httparty'
require 'json'
require 'simple_angel/search'
require 'simple_angel/version'
require 'simple_angel/company'

module SimpleAngel

end

Lastly, when I (again), run “ruby -Ilib lib/simple_angel/search.rb” (with all of search.rb’s ‘requires’ commented out (^&^), this is my error message:

[ddouglas@coders:~/Develop/simple_angel on master]
% ruby -Ilib lib/simple_angel/search.rb                                       
lib/simple_angel/search.rb:15:in `search': uninitialized constant SimpleAngel::Search::HTTParty (NameError)
from lib/simple_angel/search.rb:24:in `<module:SimpleAngel>'
from lib/simple_angel/search.rb:8:in `<main>'

^&^ – now that we’re all up to speed here, I might as well include the error that happened when I left search.rb’s “requires” in place

% ruby -Ilib lib/simple_angel/search.rb                                       ✹
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require': cannot load such file -- company (LoadError)
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'
from lib/simple_angel/search.rb:6:in `<main>'

Answer 1

I can’t say I understand the point the class is trying to make regarding splitting up your files.

The first error (uninitialized constant SimpleAngel::Search::HTTParty) is because from within SimpleAngel::Search, you call HTTParty. Try changing that to ::HTTParty to specify the root namespace.