On May 2, 2009 11:00am, Fernando Perez <li...@ruby-forum.com> wrote:
Hi,
Using Ruby on Rails, let's says I have an Article model and Comment
model. An Article has_many :comments,
Using Rais idiom, one would do something like that in the
comments_controller/create:
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
@article.comments.create(params[:comment])
I don't like too much this approach because it puts too much
intelligence into the controller and it's not easy to test/spec/mock.
So I'd like to push this into a model. So would you tell Article model
to create a new Comment given params[:comment], or would you tell
Comment to create a new Comment given an article_id?
>From a BDD point of view, only creating a new comment record is what
counts, but I'd like to be more careful about Demeter, encapsulation,
tell don't ask, ...
These are all good things to consider, but they also need to be weighed against the design decisions made for us by ActiveRecord. You *could* write wrapper methods for chains like this and make Demeter happy, but to do that for every single call you need has a cost too, and the associations are pretty close to free.
I've rolled both ways on different apps - writing wrappers for everything and leaving the chains as/is in others. The thing I've noticed is that stubbing one association feels fine to me, but stubbing an association's association starts to get painful in the code examples.
Now there is a very good compromise solution in Luke Redpath's library named "Demeter's Revenge" which basically creates create_comment (and other related methods) on the fly for you. This, to me, is an ideal solution for a declarative framework like ActiveRecord where you don't even see the comments method in the Article class. Should the underlying structure change, you can always redefine create_comment in the Article class and all it's consumers are happy. The code examples are happy because they need not stub chains. And your fingers are happy because you're not typing out all of these wrapper methods.
The only potentially unhappiness is going to come from whomever reads the code later and is not familiar with the plugin and wonders where the hell that method is being defined.
That's my 2 cents. Anybody else? David
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