Peter Marklund

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Fri Jul 04 2008 02:28:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Rails Configuration: Yielding self in initializer

I've come across situations in Rails where you want to repeatedly invoke methods on some class with a long name and it gets ugly and tedious that you have to repeat the class name on every line. I just realized that unlike in the config/environments files the config object is not available in the config/initializer files. I use the AppConfig plugin to parameterize my application and I came up with the yield_self method to make my config/intializers/app_config.rb more readable:

# Method to supplement the app_config plugin. I want to crash early and be alerted if
# I have forgotten to define a parameter in an environment.
def config_param(name)
  AppConfig.param(name) do
    raise("No app_config param '#{name}' defined in environment #{RAILS_ENV}, " +
      "please define it in config/environments/#{RAILS_ENV}.rb and restart the server")
  end
end

class Object
  def yield_self
    yield self
  end
end

AppConfig::Base.yield_self do |config|
  config.site_name = "Simple Signup"
  config.admin_email = '"Simple Signup" <info@simplesignup.se>'
  config.exception_emails = %w(info@simplesignup.se)
  config.email_prefix = "[#{config.site_name}]"
  config.signup_timeout = 5
  config.send_activate_email = false

  config.transaction_fee = lambda do |price|
    price.blank? ? 0.0 : [10.0, 5.0+0.035*price.to_f].max.round(2)
  end

  config.bank_fee = lambda do |price, card|
    0.0
  end
end

ExceptionNotifier.exception_recipients = config_param(:exception_emails)
ExceptionNotifier.sender_address = %{peter_marklund@fastmail.fm}
ExceptionNotifier.email_prefix = "#{config_param(:email_prefix)} ERROR: "

The method config_param might be more appropriately named app_config. That will be a refactoring for another day though.