Ruby Forum Ruby on Rails > include vs. require vs. require_dependency

i am struggling a bit with all of them .. could someone be so nice a
describe me the exact differences, pros & cons of all of them ... thx a
lot!

I wrote about include/require in my blog a while back ...

http://francis.blog-city.com/extendingmixin_ruby_classes_with_modules.htm

I've never used require_dependency ...

HTH

On Nov 29, 2007, at 12:52 PM, ghoti wrote:

> I wrote about include/require in my blog a while back ...
>
> http://francis.blog-city.com/extendingmixin_ruby_classes_with_modules.htm
>
> I've never used require_dependency ...

That's internal Rails stuff. More or less it means "load this library
and monitor the constants it defines".

If your file follows Rails conventions it is picked up automatically
and class reloading works out of the box.

If the file does not follow them, for example "application.rb" would
be called "application_controller.rb" if it did, you can still load it
and get the benefits of automatic class reloading via
require_dependency.

I don't know whether is meant for public consumption though, since it
is not documented. Just follow Rails file naming conventions and let
Dependencies do its job.

-- fxn

On Nov 29, 2007, at 5:52 AM, ghoti wrote:

>
> I wrote about include/require in my blog a while back ...
>
> http://francis.blog-city.com/extendingmixin_ruby_classes_with_modules.htm


Nice simple explanation. Thanks,

By the way, and totally off-topic, to anybody wondering about the name
"ghoti," if I recall correctly, it's an alternate "spelling" of the
word fish, using the gh from laugh, the o from women, an the ti from
nation.
It was constructed by somebody (I don't remember who) a long long time
ago complaining about spelling in English. I hadn't thought of it in
many years until I saw it here. :-)

thanks for the detailed explanation ...
could you briefly outline the "naming conventions"

On Nov 29, 2007, at 5:24 PM, Michal Gabrukiewicz wrote:

> thanks for the detailed explanation ...
> could you briefly outline the "naming conventions"

Sure, take the fully-qualified name of the class you want Rails to
autoload and run this:

    $ script/console
    Loading development environment.
    >> "FooBar::Woo".underscore + '.rb'
    => "foo_bar/woo.rb"

That says that if the class FooBar::Woo is defined in a file named
"foo_bar/woo.rb" living inmediately below some standard application
directory like app/controllers Rails will find the file and load it
for you automatically.

For example, if you define the User class in the file user.rb under
app/models you don't need to require 'user'. Note you would in regular
Ruby.

-- fxn

i see... but this applies only to the contents within the "app" 
directory doesnt it?

On Nov 29, 2007, at 7:16 PM, Michal Gabrukiewicz wrote:

> i see... but this applies only to the contents within the "app"
> directory doesnt it?

Not really. It applies to the contents listed in
Dependencies.load_path, which in addition to app subdirs include lib
and a few others. Check it out in the console.

That list may be further customised via config.load_paths in
environment.rb.

-- fxn

thanks.. great help!! will try to use that knowledge....