Cleaning Up Your Models Folder

I love really complex applications.
It feels safe and warm knowing that your code relies on 20 database tables, and maybe some of those have 5 inherited types.

So you end up with a models directory that looks like this;

app/
    models/
        carnivore.rb
        carrot.rb
        cauliflower.rb
        meat.rb
        person.rb
        sausage.rb
        smelly_sausage.rb
        steak.rb
        vegetarian.rb
        vegetarian_sausage.rb
        vegetable.rb

PROPER MESSY! (and that's only from 3 tables - meats, vegetables, people)
So we want to impose a structure on it,
we want;

app/
    models/
        meat/
            sausages/
                sausage.rb
                smelly_sausage.rb
                vegetarian_sausage.rb

            meat.rb
            steak.rb

        people/
            carnivore.rb
            person.rb
            vegetarian.rb

        vegetables/
            carrot.rb
            cauliflower.rb
            vegetable.rb 

Without doing any work you could make this happen;
Rails expects the model People::Person to live in /people/person.rb,
so if you want to write "People::Person.find(...." every time, then feel free to do so.

The quick, and clean solution is just to add the following lines to environment.rb.

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
    %W( meat meat/sausages people vegetables ).each do |extra_path|
        config.load_paths << "#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/models/#{extra_path}"
    end
end

And, actually,
that's all it takes!!!

Easy-peasy, SCORE!!!!

You can do whatever you want to tidy up yours tests and fixtures, you just have to add a couple of "/.." to the top of any tests you've moved

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../test_helper'

for anything in /test/unit,

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../test_helper'

for anything in /test/unit/stuff,
and so on....