Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Simple global settings for your Rails app

Posted 17 December 2007 @ 2am | Tagged thoughts

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If you’ve got some global settings and don’t want to bother storing them in the database or YAML, here’s a quick way to get easy dotted notation access to them:

ApplicationSettings = OpenStruct.new(
    :some_variable => true,

    :complex_settings => {
      :one => [:two,:three,:four],

      :foo => {
        :bar => :baz
      }
    }
)

Then you can simply access it via ApplicationSettings.complex_settings.one. Quick & dirty, or quick & clean?

The dotted notation doesn’t seem to work:

http://pastie.caboo.se/130483

Or am I missing something?

Oops! I modified the pastie to reflect changes. I forgot I was using an extension that made all my hashes dot-accessible.

# turn hashes into openstruct-like objects with dotted access
class Hash
def method_missing(meth, *args, &block)
if args.size == 0
self[meth.to_s] || self[meth.to_sym]
end
end
end