Comments on: Reopening Ruby Classes

By: Josh Cheek

Josh Cheek — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:19:06 +0000

As of rails 2.x you would put it in an initializer. Make a ruby file in config/initializers and do your monkey patching in there.

By: Find tests more easily in your Rails test.log « I like stuff

Find tests more easily in your Rails test.log « I like stuff — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:38:06 +0000

[...] for your Rails project. To me this seems like a nice little example of how Ruby’s open classes can benefit developers (while understandably considered harmful by some). In a language without [...]

By: Learning Scala: Performance Impact of Implicit Conversions « Villane

Learning Scala: Performance Impact of Implicit Conversions « Villane — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 16:46:48 +0000

[...] languages have ways of doing similar things. JavaScript and Ruby actually let you add methods to existing objects, and these methods will then work everywhere else [...]

By: TechKnow

TechKnow — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 04:48:43 +0000

@Gene - If you want to reopen a Ruby class when Rails startups you might want to create a simple Rails plugin. If you go this route, just reopen the String class, or any class for that matter, in the init.rb file for the plugin. Sometime back I mentioned that you can reopen a class in Rails application helper. I wrote that as a way to expend/update models provided by Rails plugins but it will also help you.

By: Gene

Gene — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 15:14:12 +0000

Thanks – I have a question related that I can’t get answered to. In a Rails app, where do I do extensions of String like this? I want the String class to get extended as soon as rails starts up and have my additional string methods be available throughout the rails app.

By: Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:25:17 +0000

Right on, I wrote a whole book about the Commons, but I do think that StringUtils is less of a great utility and more of a sign of huge problems.

The fact that you have to resort to big static method libraries and that we’re still doing this in 2007 is an embarrassing failure.

By: TechKnow

TechKnow — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 17:37:34 +0000

You would only use the class’ class_eval when you don’t know the type before hand. But if you know that you only want to add new code to a String, then it would be more intuitive to do as you suggest.

By: NoKarma

NoKarma — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 16:50:48 +0000

Woah! Are you sure that using SomeClass.class_eval do {some code} end is a good idea?

Why not simply using this:

class String
[some_code]
end