Understanding where certain 'inherited' methods come from in ActionController::Base

[Manuca]

Hi I just started getting my hands on Rails, I've been reading a good
book on the subject but now I want to continue by myself and with the
help of the rails api documentation but I find it quite difficult to
follow (copared with the Java generated docs for example).

One thing that I still can't get to understand is how methods like
'layout' become available on my controllers to mention one example I
supposed that the method was defined inside ActionController::Base but
reading the docs I see there is no such thing defined there.

Can you please clarify on this issue, I believe it may be something
related to the Ruby that I still don't know about.

Thanks in advance.
M.

[Leonardo Mateo]

Try apidock.com.

http://apidock.com/rails/ActionController

Hope it helps.

--
Leonardo Mateo.
There's no place like ~

[Manuca]

On Dec 17, 9:31 am, Leonardo Mateo <leonardoma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Try apidock.com.
> http://apidock.com/rails/ActionController
> Hope it helps.
>

Ok thanks for the info, those docs seem more friendly, anyway, I still
don't understand where those methods (for ex. layout) get inherited or
injected don't know how that magic happens they aren't mentioned even
in apidock.com.

Thanks
m.

[Hassan Schroeder]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Manuca <man...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Ok thanks for the info, those docs seem more friendly, anyway, I still
> don't understand where those methods (for ex. layout) get inherited or
> injected don't know how that magic happens

when in doubt, cd to one of your projects and e.g.
find vendor/rails -type f -exec grep -H 'def layout' {} \;

You'll see exactly how the magic happens :-) (and in this case, also
lots o' comments).

HTH,
--
Hassan Schroeder ------------------------ hassan.s...@gmail.com
twitter: @hassan

[Manuca]

On Dec 17, 5:13 pm, Hassan Schroeder <hassan.schroe...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> when in doubt, cd to one of your projects and e.g.
>   find vendor/rails  -type f -exec grep -H 'def layout' {} \;

Thanks again for the feedback, yep I already did a recursive grep
inside my gems dirs and found those definitions I guess there i'll
find the real info, anyway what I find confusing is that in the docs
those automatic inclusions are not mentioned, maybe those are obvious
or implicit and they can be derived from the module name I really
don't know because Im also new to the Ruby language.

Is it possible that because both ActionController::Base and
ActionController::Layout::ClassMethods share th 'ActionController'
module they are inside the same namespace and all public methods of
Layout are available to Base? Can I conclude that this is the case
with all clases inside ActionController?

Please excuse my enormouse ignorance on the subject
Thanks for you patience!
m.

[Yehuda Katz]

It might be easier to understand what's going on in Rails master. Take
a look at http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/actionpack/lib/action_controller/base.rb#L5-37.
As you can see, the Base class is including a series of modules. In
Ruby, modules are like dynamic superclasses; including one adds the
module to the superclass chain.

For instance, observe that ActionController::Base includes
ActionController::UrlFor. You can follow that module to
http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/actionpack/lib/action_controller/metal/url_for.rb,
which has the much-used url_for method (http://github.com/rails/rails/
blob/master/actionpack/lib/action_controller/metal/url_for.rb#L28-39).

Hope this helps.

-- Yehuda

[Manuca]

On Dec 17, 6:21 pm, Yehuda Katz <wyc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hope this helps.

Thanks Yehuda that was of help.
m.