Plugin Conventions Redux

Posted by trevor Mon, 31 Oct 2005 18:59:00 GMT

Last week Jamis responded to my post about plugin naming conventions.

If any of the rest of this post is going to make sense you’d better check out the above links first.

Anyhow, there’s been a bit more mailing-list to-ing and fro-ing about the fact that Jamis’ suggestion has problems, which I’ll write about today.

When is this an issue?

This is something that we should get out of the way here and now.

If your plugin is just mixing-in methods for a DSL (excellent link, by the way) like a new ActiveRecord ‘Acts’ – or you have some other situation where you only have have a couple of files to ‘require’, it’s a lot simpler and clearer to just require those files explicitly in your init.rb. For example:


plugins/enumerations_mixin/init.rb
plugins/enumerations_mixin/lib/proto_cool/enumerations/acts_enumerated.rb
plugins/enumerations_mixin/lib/proto_cool/enumerations/has_enumerated.rb
plugins/enumerations_mixin/lib/proto_cool/enumerations/virtual_enumerations.rb

My init.rb file will look like this:


require 'proto_cool/enumerations/acts_enumerated'
require 'proto_cool/enumerations/has_enumerated'
require 'proto_cool/enumerations/virtual_enumerations'
ActiveRecord::Base.class_eval do
  include ProtoCool::Enumerations::ActsEnumerated
  include ProtoCool::Enumerations::HasEnumerated
end

Complex Hierarchies

But what if your plugin has a lot of files to require? You may be tempted to organize your requires as Jamis suggested in his email. After all, it looks a lot like how rails organizes its own require calls. A stripped down example of a complex hierarchy might be:


lib/jamis
lib/jamis.rb
lib/jamis/buck
lib/jamis/buck.rb
lib/jamis/buck/my_module.rb
lib/jamis/buck/my_other_module.rb

lib/jamis.rb would contain: require 'jamis/buck'

and lib/jamis/buck.rb would contain:


require 'jamis/buck/my_module'
require 'jamis/buck/my_other_module'

The idea is that you could simply refer to Jamis::Buck::MyModule or Jamis::Buck::MyOtherModule without having to do any explicit require calls in the code that first references those modules. Rails will automagically “require 'jamis'” the first time you reference the Jamis module.

The problem with this approach is that once “require 'jamis'” has been called, all subsequent calls will have no effect, even if there are many jamis.rb files in the $LOAD_PATH. If Jamis releases another plugin that relies on automagic requires his full set of classes won’t be loaded.

Strategies

There are a number of strategies you can use to work around this. First of all, you can just use explicit requires in your init.rb file. You can still use Jamis’ method for everything in your module namespace that is unique to the current plugin though. Using the above example you’d just get rid of jamis.rb and in your init.rb file you’d have a single “require 'jamis/buck'”.

Another strategy would be to use load instead of require for all files that you (as a plugin author) know will appear in many places in the $LOAD_PATH. You could keep your jamis.rb file but in your init.rb you would simply say “load 'jamis.rb'”.

Pie in the Sky

There’s something slightly non-intuitive about the above strategies though. I had one of those “wouldn’t it be nice if…” moments and knocked together some code that allows this:

in lib/jamis.rb


module Jamis
  include Dependencies::AutoRequire
  auto_require 'buck'
end

in lib/jamis/buck.rb


module Jamis::Buck
  include Dependencies::AutoRequire
  auto_require 'my_module'
  auto_require 'my_other_module'
end

in init.rb


load 'jamis.rb'

There’s a couple of ‘nice’ features here. First of all, if you auto_require something, it will use the module name to construct the full require call. So “Jamis::Buck.auto_require 'my_module'” will result in a “require 'jamis/buck/my_module'” call.

Second, if you “auto_require 'buck'” and there is both a buck directory and a buck.rb file the require will be treated differently. The resulting require call guarantees your particular buck.rb file is loaded even if there is another buck.rb file in the $LOAD_PATH that has already had “require 'jamis/buck'” called against it.

You may be wondering why I didn’t just add the auto_require method to the Module class. I could have, but it makes me feel dirty.

The funny thing is, in order for this to be useful to me, I’ll either have to ship and… um… require a file that contains Dependencies::AutoRequire with each of my plugins – or I’ll have to convince the rails core team that Dependencies::AutoRequire would be beneficial to more than just me. Well, I think it’s funny…

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