Expalanation

Unleash your models and quickly and easily annotate anything. Store booleans, strings, or optionally serialized objects (hashes, custom classes, whatever) without extra migrations.

Want your users to be able to define custom settings?

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    include Configurator
  end

Basics

Now you can do things like:

  @user.config[:receive_email_alerts?] = true

or

  @user.config[:notification_address] = 'user@gmail.com'

Think of it as just a giant hash.

  @user.config = { :favorite_animal => 'dog', :favorite_color => 'blue' }

Namespaces

Support for one level of namespacing:

  @user.config[:animals, :favorite] = 'cat'

Namespaces within hash assignments:

  @user.config = { :animals => { :favorite => 'cat', :likes_elephants? => true }, :artists => { :favorite => 'Radiohead' } }

Form support

Easy to use in views:

  <% fields_for :config, @user.config do |c| %>

    <%= c.select :favorite_color, %w(red green blue) %>

  <% end %>

Default Options

Databases don’t come filled, so there’s an easy way to set defaults on your models.

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    include Configurator

    default_configuration :favorite_color => 'red', :receive_email_alerts? => true, :salary => { :default_for_manager => '$55,000', :default_for_employee => '$25,000' }
  end

  @user.config[:favorite_color] # => 'red'
  @user.config[:favorite_color] = 'green'
  @user.config[:favorite_color] # => 'green'

Setup

To setup, you really just need to create the config table:

  class AddConfigTable < ActiveRecord::Migration
    def self.up
      create_table :config do |t|

        t.references    :associated, :polymorphic => true

        t.string        :namespace
        t.string        :key,         :limit => 40,     :null => false
        t.string        :value

      end
    end

    def self.down
      drop_table :config
    end
  end

Include Configurator into the models you need it in, and that’s it.

If you need to be able to store complex objects, or strings greater than 255 characters, change the ‘value’ column to text. You can add to the ConfigurationHash class:

  serialize :value

I haven’t tried this yet, but it should work fine.

Copyright © 2008 Brennan Dunn, released under the MIT license