Hi, at the moment it is quite difficult to combine multiple Rails apps, e.g. a forum and a wiki. Neither components nor engines provide a sufficient level of separation between the parts of the applications to make this considerably easier, because in the end everything becomes mixed up in the same namespace.
A way to avoid this would be to create all the engine classes (models, controllers, helpers) inside a module. This would open a whole number of interesting possibilities: Controllers/Routing =================== Controller names of different applications do not collide, you can have a BooksController both in a wiki and in a book database. Routing a path directly to the controller of an engine could look like this: map.connect 'book/:id', :module = "wiki_engine", :controller => "books", :action => "show" To delegate a path to the routing of the engine: map.connect 'wiki/:path', :module = "wiki_engine" ...and the "path" part will be processed by the routes.rb of the engine. Models ====== If you need to "talk" to a model of another engine you could write WikiEngine::Book.find(xyz) If you want the WikiEngine and the BooksEngine to use the same "User" model: WikiEngine::User = BooksEngine::User = MyUserModel To prevent collision between table names you could assign a table prefix to an engine or make it use a seperate database connection: WikiEngine::table_prefix = 'wiki' There might be problems I haven't thought of, and changing Rails to deal with modules would probably be a lot of work. But on the other hand it could be a more general solution for both components and engines in the current form. I would really like to hear the core developers' opinion on that. Andreas _______________________________________________ Rails-core mailing list Rails-core@lists.rubyonrails.org http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails-core
