Provide succinct example of extending models in Readme or Wiki

[equivalentideas]

Monkey patching / extending models seems to be a bit tricky in Rails, though I'm sure there's a conventional approach you might recommend for the Gutentag models.

I'm trying to override #to_params on Gutentag::Tag in an initializer, but I believe it's being canceled by Rails's loading process, and I'm going to hack around it for now as I can't work it out.

I understand solving that problem isn't within the scope of this project, but I thought that a simple example of the conventional pattern for extending the models might be a good addition to the readme or wiki here, as it seems like a potentially common use case.

[pat]

Hi Luke,

It is a bit of an edge case, but would nice to have it noted somewhere. Did you end up figuring out a neat solution? I'm wondering if the best way is to include a module into Gutentag::Tag within an after_initialize block…

# in config/initializers/gutentag.rb or similar

Rails.application.config.after_initialize do
  Gutentag::Tag.include TagParams
end

[equivalentideas]

Hey Pat, yep I did just get it working to extract a couple of methods (your after_initialize tip here was the key 😄 ):

# in config/initializers/gutentag.rb

Rails.application.config.after_initialize do
  Gutentag::Tag.instance_eval do
    def find_by_name_param!(string)
      self.find_by_name!(string.tr('+', ' '))
    end
  end

  Gutentag::Tag.class_eval do
    def to_param
      self.name.tr(' ', '+')
    end
  end
end

Do you think that would be useful as an example of extending the classes? You might prefer the module inclusion, which seems cleaner maybe.

[equivalentideas]

Turned out that wasn't a working solution because in dev, rails reloads the models between page loads and blows away our changes :) Here's what I have working now:

# in config/initializers/gutentag.rb

require 'tag'

Rails.application.config.to_prepare do
  Gutentag::Tag.include Tag
end

And

# in lib/tag.rb

module Tag
  def self.included base
    base.extend ClassMethods
    base.send :include, InstanceMethods
  end

  module ClassMethods
    def find_by_name_param!(string)
      self.find_by_name!(string.tr('+', ' '))
    end
  end

  module InstanceMethods
    def to_param
      self.name.tr(' ', '+')
    end
  end
end

[pat]

This is now in the README :) https://github.com/pat/gutentag#extending

[equivalentideas]

Very nice :) Thanks @pat 💞 this has been really useful for a project I'm working on, tracking the public lobbying activities of the fossil fuels lobby.

[pat]

Oh interesting! Is that deployed publicly anywhere?

[equivalentideas]

Oh interesting! Is that deployed publicly anywhere?

Not yet, but I'll let you know :)