Namespaced models
Published over 5 years ago

I don’t really understand why people use namespaced models. I see ActiveRecord models as DSL for database. There is no concept of namespacing in Database, then why should you have them with models ? Apart from that, they are very buggy too !

“I am generally not a huge fan of namespaces for models. As I don’t think that’s a good fit for splitting up your domain.”
- DHH

From what I’ve seen, the most common explanations given are :

  • To organize models
  • To reuse the code

Now let’s look at elegant solutions for both these problems.

For the purpose of this article, let’s assume you have models for different kind of pets. e.g. Dog, Cat & Rabbit.

How to organize models ?

Rails by default, wants you to put all your models in RAILS_ROOT/app/models directory. But that’s a convention. There is absolutely nothing that stops you from putting your model files anywhere you wish and organize them according to your liking and based on application specific logical groups.

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  # Your existing stuff

  config.load_paths << "#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/models/pets"
end

That’s it ! Now you can have dog.rb, cat.rb & rabbit.rb inside RAILS_ROOT/app/models/pets directory.

But what about reuse !?

Two ways to skin this cat :

  • Good ol’ mixins
  • Abstract models

Abstract models are the models which cannot have objects ( cannot be instantiated ) and hence they don’t have associated table as well. Every rails developer uses abstract model in their code without knowing it. ActiveRecord::Base. In our case, we can have an abstract model called Pet for keeping the common behavior of all the pets. And our models would look something like :

  1. RAILS_ROOT/app/models/pets/pet.rb
    class Pet < ActiveRecord::Base
  self.abstract_class = true

    
  
    class Pet < ActiveRecord::Base
    
  self.abstract_class = true
belongs_to :person validates_presence_of :name

end

  1. RAILS_ROOT/app/models/pets/dog.rb
    class Dog < Pet
  def bark
    "baaw"
  end
end

That’s it. Dog will inherit all the methods/validations/associations from parent Pet model and so will all the other models who would inherit from Pet abstract model. Please note that this is not STI as we have set self.abstract_class = true in Pet.