Single-table inheritance: Uninitialized class constant

Rails
1

This forum has been of no help before, but I am nothing daunted.

I have a “people” table, mapping to a Person ActiveRecord class, which
has two subclasses, Principal and Secondary. There is a type column.

There is a “locations” table, mapping to Location. Location belongs_to
Principal. Principal has_many Locations. There is a principal_id column
in locations.

There is a LocationsController. It renders rhtml, which contains
something like

<%= @location.principal.full_name %>

… to which Rails complains “uninitialized constant
Location::Principal”. locations_controller.rb does not refer to
Principal. The problem must come from the class information in the
relationship, or possibly in the STI type information.

If I change the belongs_to to:

belongs_to :principal, :class_name => “Person”, :foreign_key =>
“principal_id”

it works, but this bothers me. It is not what I intend. Locations belong
to Principals, not to People in general.

The alternative, I think, is to have locations_controller.rb require
‘person’, but that gives me problems with reloading in development mode.

What should I do?

$ ruby --version
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0]
$ rails --version
Rails 1.2.6

2

On 11 Nov 2008, at 21:36, Fritz A. wrote:

The alternative, I think, is to have locations_controller.rb require
‘person’, but that gives me problems with reloading in development
mode.

use require_dependency instead of require (and i would do this at the
top of the location model, not in the controller)

Fred

3

Frederick C. wrote:

use require_dependency instead of require (and i would do this at the
top of the location model, not in the controller)

This was exactly what I needed. Thank you.

It’s too bad that Pickaxe (2nd ed) and Agile Web D. with Rails
(2nd ed) didn’t mention require_dependency. Can anyone recommend a
reference that would have included it?

— F
4

On Nov 12, 8:18 pm, Fritz A. [email protected]
wrote:

Frederick C. wrote:

use require_dependency instead of require (and i would do this at the
top of the location model, not in the controller)

This was exactly what I needed. Thank you.

It’s too bad that Pickaxe (2nd ed) and Agile Web D. with Rails
(2nd ed) didn’t mention require_dependency. Can anyone recommend a
reference that would have included it?

Well it’s a rails only thing so the Pickaxe would never cover it and
it’s also a bit of slightly hairy internal stuff. “Luke, Use the
source!”

Fred