Suppose I want to make an engine that builds on another
engine. Extending engine code is pretty trivial in the application -
but what about in another engine?
I’m by no means an expert on engines, but I’ve been trying to do
something similar and thought I’d share my experience.
Specifically, I customized the UserEngine and LoginEngine in an
application for my company, then realized I wanted the same
customizations in more than one app.
So I’ve been trying to make an Engine out of those customizations. And
I think I’ve pretty much got it working. But not without some trouble.
-
Your application (not the plugin you’re creating) must not only load
the plugins in the correct order in environment.rb, but must include the
relevant modules in the right order in, say, ApplicationController (and
ApplicationHelper if applicable). This is probably obvious to someone
with more Engines experience, but it tripped me up for a while b/c I got
weird errors, for example, my Permission class was defined but without
any of the code from in UserEngine’s permission.rb. -
Plugins might be loaded (or require’d) in other places. These have
to be in order also. I ran into trouble trying to bootstrap the
UserEngine because Permission.synchronize_with_controllers manually
requires each controller class – it makes sure to require engines’
controllers before the app’s controllers, but doesn’t specify an order
(other than filesystem order) to look at the various engines. (I hacked
it so it would require LoginEngine’s controllers first, then
UserEngine’s, then other engines).
-Brian