Nested models

Rails
1

I wanted to gather some feedback from people about nested models and
the assumptions that they make about the underlying database
structure. As I see it, the primary function of nesting model classes
inside of modules is to provide a namespacing mechanism. Given that a
model class called Admin::Foo and User::Foo will both use the table
name ‘foos’ by default this namespacing seems to be incomplete. You
could always specify a different table name for each class but this is
a pretty manual approach to namespacing. The only feasible solution I
could come up with is to have a class named Admin::Foo assume a
default table name of admin__foos. The double _ would prevent a
collision with a class named AdminFoo and seems to me the most logical
way to differentiate between the two.

Just wanted to throw the topic out there, see what people thought,
etc. I would definitely consider submitting a patch if it seems like
there is some interest…

2

Has Rails even been designed with namespaces in mind?
Is it possible to put models, controllers etc. in namespaces in a
standard
Rails way?

Erik

3

I’m not really sure what the design decisions behind being able to
organize models and controllers into modules were but I can’t imagine
that namespacing was not among them. In answer to your question, yes,
controllers and models can be namespaced by placing them in a module
(so you can have a file called apps/controllers/admin/
login_controller.rb containing a class called Admin::LoginController
and another file called apps/controllers/user/login_controller.rb
containing a class called User::LoginController). You can effectively
do the same thing with models classes. The problem I am pointing out
is that even if you have models organized in this way there is no
standard way to break up the backing database tables in such a way
that collisions will not occur…

~Ross