# Rails 2 and associations-slash-loading **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [March 17, 2008, 8:17am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-2-and-associations-slash-loading/132127 "2008-03-17T08:17:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![colin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/e19b73/32.png) [@colin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/colin)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2008, 8:17am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-2-and-associations-slash-loading/132127/1 "2008-03-17T08:17:57Z")
Been encountering several (seemingly) related issues with Rails 2. Was hoping someone has run into these things and found a suitable solution: 1. instance methods disappearing in view: a. In the index action of ArticlesController, there is: @articles = @user.articles.find(…)… b. with which in index.html.erb, i call render :partial =\> ‘articles/article’, :collection =\> @articles. c. and the \_article partial calls a method such as “article.published?” which is defined in the model file and verified by unit tests. Yet I will consistently get a NoMethodError on that #published? method beginning with the second request to that page. Also, the elements in that collection don’t seem to be of the class Article as expected. Curiously, the page works as desired if in the controller I do @article = Article.find(…, :conditions =\> [“user\_id = ?”, @user.id]). And since this is a development only issue, it led to the notion that it was load-unload-reload issue related, as described in [http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/6720](http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/6720). 1. At about the same time there was the issue of “[modulename] has been removed from the module tree but is still active!” Both of these issues finally went away when i explicitly required all the library files within development.rb (originally had them required in the initializer directory). 2. Now, on a new model called “Blog”, I’m discovering that calling @blogs = @user.blogs.find(…) in the controller, and calling blog.id on an element in that collection gives me a “SystemStackError: stack level too deep” on second request and onward, and it also goes away if I set @blogs = Blog.find(… :conditions =\> [“user\_id = ?”, @user.id]). So I’m seeing different but seemingly related issues on development environment which I can step around but would rather not because it’s simply not working as I expect them to. Wondering if these nuances in my app could be the issue: - requiring and including libraries within the lib/ directory from a file in initializers.rb instead of an environment file - having modules in lib/ that reference models in app/models - defining user associations in a separate file user\_associations.rb which is called by require\_dependency before the User class is opened in user.rb Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks in advance! (Rails 2.0.2 on Leopard, Ruby 1.8.6) ---
**Author:** ![colin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/e19b73/32.png) [@colin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/colin)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2008, 9:37am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-2-and-associations-slash-loading/132127/2 "2008-03-17T09:37:07Z")
Typically this happens when you confuse the dependency system in rails. This powers the magic reloading of classes in development mode, but when it goes wrong you get things holding on references to the classes before they were reloaded. One thing that is sure to lead to chaos if is you have a file that is not reloaded every request that holds onto a reference to a class that is reloaded every request. I can’t remember if lib is in Dependencies.load\_once\_paths, but if so having modules in lib that reference models could easily be the cause of your pain. Removing lib from Dependencies.load\_once\_paths would probably to the trick. It’s also possible to confuse things by requiring things that rails could have loaded automatically. using require\_dependency ensures that all of rails’ dependency stuff is kept happy (this only requires to things in your app, not standard libraries, gems etc…) Fred ---
**Author:** ![colin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/e19b73/32.png) [@colin](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/colin)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2008, 12:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-2-and-associations-slash-loading/132127/3 "2008-03-17T12:03:51Z")
Thanks Fred, for the speedy response. I had tried moving all libraries into the models folder to see if it’d help before, and it did not help then. After hearing your helpful points, I tried many different things including renaming requires to require\_dependencies (for my custom libraries), moving lib files into model/, (lib is in the auto-reloaded path it seems, and not in the load\_once\_paths), explicitly declaring the load\_once\_paths to be an empty array… A bit resigned to turning on class caching for development to get on with the coding instead of dwelling on this at this point. But if it’s not ideal to have libraries in lib/ that reference models, what is supposed to be the best practice for creating shared functionality among models where a separate model needs to be referenced (i.e. acts\_as\_taggable, where both Tag and Tagging are necessarily referenced within the module)?