Rails related Ruby question

Rails
1

I’m doing an app that has a very frequent need to compare dates. My
code is littered with things like:

return if foo.date < 10.days.ago

Each and every time I do one of these I have to stop and think it
through to get the sense of the comparison right. “Let’s see, recent
dates are bigger than older dates, so if I want this to happen when the
date on the left is longer ago than the date on the right…” You get
the idea.

I want to open up the date class and add a couple of methods to it like
“is_more_recent_than” and “is_longer_ago_than”, so I don’t have to think
about it anymore and so my code is more readable.

There are two things I’m not sure of with this, when I define the
method, what does the method def syntax look like? Maybe:

def is_more_recent_than(right_hand_value)
self > right_hand_value # just had to think about this for the last
time!
end

and the other thing is, where can I put this such that it will be
available from controllers, and from models and from views? do I have
to put it in more than one place to have it be automatically available
(without doing an include when I want to use it) everywhere? Maybe it
needs to be in one of my Rails files instead of in my app project?

thanks,
jp

2

A simple and clean way (and also the preffered way of doing this) is
by a Rails plugin.

Create a folder under vendor/plugins, maybe “date_extensions”, create
an “init.rb” file. Your init.rb would look like this:

Date.class_eval do

def is_older_than( other_date )
self < other_date
end

end

And so on, adding the other methods you want. For more about ruby
method definition, read the metaprogramming chapter from →
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596516178/toc.html

Maurício Linhares
http://alinhavado.wordpress.com/ (pt-br) | http://blog.codevader.com/
(en)

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Jeff P.

3

Maurício Linhares wrote:

A simple and clean way (and also the preffered way of doing this) is
by a Rails plugin.

Create a folder under vendor/plugins, maybe “date_extensions”, create
…
Maur�cio Linhares
http://alinhavado.wordpress.com/ (pt-br) | http://blog.codevader.com/
(en)

Thanks Mauricio,
I had no idea it was that simple to make a plugin!

thanks,
jp