Plugins - Settings

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Settings Plugin

Settings is a plugin that makes managing a table of global key, value pairs easy. Think of it like a global Hash stored in you database, that uses simple ActiveRecord like methods for manipulation. Keep track of any global setting that you dont want to hard code into your rails app. You can store any kind of object. Strings, numbers, arrays, or any object.

Setup

You must create the table used by the Settings model. Simply run this command:

  ruby script/generate settings_migration

Now just put that migration in the database with:

  rake db:migrate

Usage

The syntax is easy. First, lets create some settings to keep track of:

  Settings.admin_password = 'supersecret'
  Settings.date_format    = '%m %d, %Y'
  Settings.cocktails      = ['Martini', 'Screwdriver', 'White Russian']
  Settings.foo            = 123

Now lets read them back:

  Settings.foo            # returns 123

Changing an existing setting is the same as creating a new setting:

  Settings.foo = 'super duper bar'

Decide you dont want to track a particular setting anymore?

  Settings.destroy :foo
  Settings.foo            # returns nil

Want a list of all the settings?

  Settings.all            # returns {'admin_password' => 'super_secret', 'date_format' => '%m %d, %Y'}

Set defaults for certain settings of your app. This will cause the defined settings to return with the Specified value even if they are not in the database. Make a new file in config/initializers/settings.rb with the following:

  Settings.defaults[:some_setting] = 'footastic'

Now even if the database is completely empty, you app will have some intelligent defaults:

  Settings.some_setting   # returns 'footastic'

That’s all there is to it!. Enjoy!

Alex Wayne

http://github.com/Squeegy/rails-settings

git://github.com/Squeegy/rails-settings.git

Rails' (MIT)

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Nils 2 May 2008

This seems like a very PHP way of doing settings/options the same as WP or Drupal where serialized data is persisted to the database. Is that right?

I guess this is OK if you have only a few settings in your application. It will be inefficient after that, especially if you only need to access one or two settings at a time, which will likely be the main use case in many applications.

Thanks. Good for small applications.

Alex Wayne 12 Apr 2008

SHould work fine with Edge Rails now after the recent update. Get the latest from the GitHub link.

Frederico Araujo 1 Nov 2007

Doesn't work with Rails Edge yet. Nice plugin, and very useful.

I have a patch so it saves the values in memcached. if anyone wants it. let me know

Tom Fakes 26 Oct 2006

Not clear from the documentation, but the default settings need to be set before the Rails::Initializer.run part of the environment.rb file.

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