Rails – The Missing Parts
eng.joingrouper.com
eng.joingrouper.com
The key point for an "interactor" extraction is imo when you have multiple models being created in symphony, like a Signup model. Or if you for some reason need to reuse the behavior.
But if all your controllers look like this, with one "interactor" model per action, you're doing it wrong.
Whatever floats your boat, though. If this is what you prefer, great. But please hold the "beginner's version" crap. Plenty of large apps are built with vanilla Rails. Basecamp is one.
But they're useful for dealing with side-effects of a particular operation too (sending multiple emails, notifying admins). Much better than ActiveRecord callbacks.
If you put this logic in the controller, what happens when you want a separate API controller that does the same thing? Or some admin functionality elsewhere in the codebase? There's zero possibility of code re-use.
YAGNI, and all that.
Because when the reuse case actually arrives, you might find that you need to reuse some, but not all of the action. If you're literally doing the exact same thing for both web and api, why are you using a separate API controller? Just use respond_to with formats.
Second, yes, you shouldn't have side-effects like sending email in your models. But you don't need to! Just stick that logic in your controllers. That's what it's there for -- to render the views (of which emails is one of them -- see http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/emails-are-views.htm...).
The AR callbacks are wonderful for coordinating the domain model. Often times you'll want to create auxiliary objects when something else is created. That's what's it's there for. Or to otherwise keep the integrity of the domain model in place.
This example is from a real-life codebase, and the interactor was extracted from 3 or 4 (bloated, repetitive) controllers. Perhaps this could have been made clearer in the post.
I'm not arguing at all that every controller needs an Interactor, or all Rails codebases should start out with Interactors present.
I am saying that Interactors are very useful concepts for re-using code, and that many medium and large Rails codebases could benefit from them.
Callbacks in Controllers and AR::Models tend to make things worse IMO for anything other than authentication; and for intricate actions interactors seem like the best defence.
I have had the (mis)fortune to jump into a number of large Rails codebases and I can say with hand-on-heart that the only ones that made any sense off-the-bat were ones using a this-or-similar pattern.
The community is embracing policies, interactors and decorators for a reason. Real developers are having real problems when Rails apps get a certain size, and there is no endorsed method on how to handle these problems.
Surely a couple of asides on the Rails docs and some official endorsement could help point new developers in the direction of a possible solution? A solution the industry already seems to be taking; regardless of whether 37Signals deems it fit for their particular domain.
As small as it needs to be in order to get the job done, and as large as it must be to get it done clearly. Sometimes that's zero lines of code; sometimes it's 500. You can usually factor down a 500 line method, but it may be worth asking what the breadth cost is should the code really be single-use.
If your metric is anything else, then you're playing Stupid Metrics Games, like that espoused by Code Climate.
This method in mime-types is reported by Code Climate as a code smell. They're wrong: it's the smallest it can possibly be while still correctly performing the necessary goal; any smaller, and you have to break it into multiple smaller methods that provide no value except keeping Code Climate happy. https://github.com/halostatue/mime-types/blob/master/lib/mim... The method is ~35 lines long. There are other cases I can provide from open source work (https://github.com/halostatue/mime-types/blob/master/lib/mim... is a good example: deprecated code, parser for a file type where splitting into multiple methods only complicates the logic flow).
It is true that the larger a method gets the less readable, understandable, and clear it gets—but that should never translate into the sort of nonsensical request you made, asking about maximum LOC. Asking that paints you as a prescriptivist who doesn't bother understanding the context the code requires.
I've been writing software for a long time, and while I try to write methods as short, clear, composable “paragraphs”, I sometimes will write something much longer than is readable because I can't figure out a meaningful way to break it down. That comes over time and reading and interaction with the code.
The best developers in my experience are pragmatic. They are aware of design patterns, but don't treat them like sewing patterns. They are aware of development practices, but don't treat them like holy writ. The GoF design patterns book is an excellent descriptivist treatise, but then people started treating it like a cookbook and looked for reasons to implement Patterns everywhere, rather than extracting the patterns from their code.
Blog posts like this one (that tell me that I should use an Interactor) pattern are actively dangerous, because they provide dicta without properly explaining the pain that the pattern evolved to solve, or the proper evolution of the pattern.
The current code base I work on shows a lot of evidence of Rails Fads just like this one, and I'm trying to get my team to step back and ask why we do things certain ways and to go back to first principles. Don't just reach for a Presenter because it's what was done before. Don't even reach for an ActiveModel::Serializer because it's what we're preferring now for API representations. Figure out your problem. State it clearly. Write the solution clearly. Find code that works similarly and figure out (a) if and (b) how they can be extracted into common code.
There is a cost to adopting things like Presenters and making smaller methods: your interface becomes larger. You can complain all you like of large files and functions, but code bases that have large numbers of classes whose purpose aren't clear…are harder to navigate and understand. (I have, in the current code base, unextracted code from external classes when that external class is used in one place and it makes the behaviour more understandable. It also provides a better place to understand where similar behaviour may appear later so that we can properly extract code if and when it is necessary later.)
Wrong? Smallest it can possibly be? Those are strong claims.
I definitely disagree with Code Climate from time to time. But I try to keep an open mind.
I've found that trying to follow dumb rules can be enlightening, even when my first reaction is that I disagree. This goes for Code Climate as well as arbitrary rules, such as Sandi Metz': https://gist.github.com/henrik/4509394
I looked at your `priority_compare`, for example. As someone who did not write that code, I find it a little hard to follow. It has conditionals four levels deep (counting the ternaries). Your `Mime::TYPE` class is quite long, as is its test.
I would let the Code Climate feedback inspire me to attempt to extract a method object in this case, along these lines: https://gist.github.com/henrik/9355101
That would result in more code overall, but smaller objects on average, and to my eyes readability is improved because the complexity is a little abstracted. Do you truly feel it provides no value?
More complex and less readable: you’ve taken the comparison out of context of the class which is being used for comparison and put it in a different class and file that has to be opened for understanding a priority comparison. Worse, that separate class and file isn’t going to be reusable for anything else, because it depends heavily on the (admittedly large, but justifiably so) public interface of MIME::Type. So, readability is made worse for the sake of a dubious improvement in testability and no value in reuse.
If your editor supports code folding (it should, and you should be using it), then you don’t even have to see the implementation of `priority_compare` if you don’t need it.
Demonstrably wrong: you’re calling `#simplified_value` twice. You could make that not as ugly by caching, but that’s already known to be a waste of time because your extraction…
Destroys performance: `priority_compare` is used for sorting (as the code comment states outright). Creating a new object for each and every comparison is going to send sort performance to hell in a handbasket with rockets on it. It’s the same problem that plagues people who use decoration heavily: performance sucks and memory use gets ugly quick. The calling of `#simplified_value` twice doesn’t help here, and caching the value only makes memory use worse.
The code comment on `priority_compare` is clear: it’s a specialized implementation of `<=>` used for sorting from MIME::Types#[]. That should immediately halt any consideration of extracting the code into an object that needs creation, and continuing on with that is a failure of good software development in favour of purity suggested by stupid rules. Even extracting it into a class method is of highly questionable value, because now you have to (as you do with your extraction) know the left and right comparison objects, rather than (safely) assuming that the undecorated version is the object itself. It’s rather the difference between operators overloading in C++ where you need to provide both left and right values vs only providing the right value because the left value is the object itself.
I considered separating the if/elsif conditions to separate methods, but you still need the if/elsif conditions, and all you’re doing is pushing code around in ways that, once again, will not be used outside of `priority_compare`.
I had considered implementing `priority_compare` at the call-site, but it’s used at two places in MIME::Types. So, the `priority_compare` is reused, but the component parts aren’t, really.
I will admit to laying a trap with `priority_compare`: I’ve worked on this code off and on for ten years. Code Climate, being a naïve program, cannot understand how the code is going to be used, but only understands how it’s defined and measures it against some fairly simplistic and stupid metrics. They can be interesting when you are first approaching a program to understand hotspots, but their value drops to zero very quickly compared to the understanding you have from working with the code regularly.
Where I think Code Climate (and similar tools; they just happen to be fairly high-profile in the Ruby community) goes wrong is that a lot of inexperienced and naïve developers tend to treat it as Truth that Must Be Followed. Many of these folks are also fans of so-called “Clean Code” techniques and otherwise lack the experience necessary to know when not to follow these sorts of rules and assume that Code Climate is good becaus it simplifies the score to a GPA/grade.
Performance: could be. If your context is one where performance is paramount and trumps readability/maintainability, that may certainly be easier to achieve with less factored code. I spent zero time trying to optimize the code.
I suspect this design doesn't make that as hard as you make it sound, though. My team writes code in the style of my example, and we don't have problems optimizing when it's called for. Though we avoid optimizing at the expense of readability unless we see a real problem.
I find it interesting that you think my example is clearly "more complex" and "less readable". I, of course, feel it is the other way around.
The fact that you've worked (mostly on your own, going by the contributor stats) on this library for ten years will of course mean that you know your way around it.
As a visitor to the codebase, I see big classes and big chunks of code that require me to load a lot into my head and digest it before I can make sense of it. Breaking that up a little means I can make sense of a smaller piece of more self-documenting logic, then dig down to lower abstractions as needed.
If you're saying that you find your way around your code better than my refactored code, I believe you.
If you're saying you think the refactored code would be harder to understand for the average developer, I think you're dead wrong.
This is what happens when you refactor in a vacuum, and the danger of following tools like CC or even the “advice” given in the article at the top of this chain. I would never let a developer who works with me get away with the sort of refactoring attempt you did.
As far as your code being more complex and less readable, you have traded minor depth complexity for greater breadth complexity without simplifying the main comparison at all, and (as I keep pointing out) made the performance worse, to boot. Your code is less readable because now I've got some kind of comparison object that I have to instantiate—and it takes two objects called “one” and “two”. Now, when looking at your priority comparison object, I have to jump between mime/type.rb and mime/type/priority_comparison.rb to understand the data values that are being compared.
The reality is that the MIME::Type class is dead simple: it's a validated data object with the self-documenting descriptive properties. MIME::Types is even simpler: it's a container that knows how to search for its contained class. I've done some fairly aggressive refactoring (it just used to be two files) to extract parsing and file interaction from the main classes, and what's left is just what's required to interact with the data provided by a MIME::Type and to work with a MIME::Type collection (although some of it is going away because the previous on-disk data representation was too anemic, and the current on-disk data representation provides just what's needed in a fairly efficient manner).
That you look at these and say “big classes!” says much more about your own biases than about the code. mime-types provides very little deep functionality, but a lot of documented and self-documented code. It just happens that the data included has a lot of attributes, and I'm a big believer in backwards compatibility. Next year, when I release mime-types 3.0, I'll be removing the deprecated functionality—and it'll cut the code in MIME::Type by about 35-40%, but it will still leave things that will trip up naïve complexity advice and refactorers.
I misspoke, though, about improvements to priority_compare: when I feel comfortable making mime-types use refinements, then I would probably make an in-place refinement of Nil to support #<=>. That probably won't happen until 2015 or 2016, though—I have to keep supporting versions of Ruby that don't support refinements until after the interpreter version EOLs.
I can't argue with the "deprecated code" bit – if you never need to understand or edit that code again, by all means leave it. There will be no payoff for spending time reducing the complexity.
But "splitting into multiple methods only complicates the logic flow" sounds less like Code Climate being wrong and more like you not having found good refactoring techniques, maybe.
I see several things that I think have a good chance of helping readability: extracting the whole thing to an object, then replacing the inline error handling with an error handling method ("begin" is a smell), extracting (and naming) whatever happens on each iteration of the "data" and so on.
Anyways, when I asked about a "maximum" I was not asking in absolute terms. What do you see as a reasonable max for the majority of use cases?
At which point do you start feeling bad about your method?
I don't have a max length to a method, because I'm not a prescriptivist. What I have is a point where I stop understanding what a method is doing, or I can't explain it cleanly. Sometimes I keep the method as long, but better comment it. Sometimes I factor it out. The point at which I do so varies based on the code, time, and many other factors.
I've worked on a C++ codebase that had a 3,000+ line function that was nearly impossible to factor out because of a non-trivial amount of state that would have either:
a. required passing much of that state as parameters to the factored out functions/methods (even if you put it in a wrapper object/struct); or
b. extracting all of the (working) behaviour into one or more objects whose sole purpose is to encapsulate the behaviour of this function.
I absolutely hated working on that function, but it was essentially the main loop of the program. You could step through those 3k lines and get a fairly decent feel for what the program was going to do, when, and how often it would repeat. The hardest part was where people before had extracted code out…that was called exactly once. We tried three times to extract the code—and failed three times, ending up leaving the code the way it was because our extractions were more complex and less understandable than the existing crappy code.
My point is that there's no such thing as a reasonable max for the majority of use cases. It depends on what you're doing and in what code.
Sounds like the only reason it was nearly impossible to factor out was because someone didn't stop at line 500 and say "hey this is getting out of hand".
No, they're not. They're great for coordinating activities around your database. That's not a domain model, unless your domain is databases. Conflating domain with database through the use of active record doesn't mean that structural models are domain driven, and events based around database interactions aren't going to be any more domain driven than the active record objects themselves.
The whole idea of ActiveRecord is that you to make your models with a clean interface to persistence. Among the features of that interface are the callbacks. They are there for your domain model to make use of, that's the whole story. If persistence is not part of your domain, why are you extending ActiveRecord?
You keep using the term "domain model" to refer to active record objects, which makes it clear that you've bought into the Rails appropriation of the term. AR objects are not domain models. If they were, the persistence would be handled elsewhere. Compared to a real domain model, AR objects are just a short step above using a naked database driver itself (and not necessarily an improvement thereof.) So to answer your question ("why are you extending activerecord?") its because you're taking a shortcut to dumping data into your database, and failing to create a real domain model while you're at it. That's a path that works ok for plenty of apps—but you want to know why rails has a reputation as being great at prototypes and shitty at scaling complexity? Because ActiveRecord is shitty at scaling complexity, and that's a hell of a lot more relevant to the vast majority of applications than scaling performance.
"If they were, the persistence would be handled elsewhere."
Persistance is handled elsewhere, it's handled in the superclass. If you think that's not a good idea, you shouldn't be using ActiveRecord, because that's the way it works.
You could argue there's not enough abstraction from the DB in AR, but that's a different discussion. Here we discussed if the persistance callbacks were an appropriate tool for in the domain model, and I reckon they are.
Also, any fool knows that putting lots of code in a single file is not a good way of scaling complexity, so yeah at some point you're going to need to break your code out in concerns and what not. ActiveRecord most certainly does not stand in the way of that.
1) I did argue exactly that; 2) it follows from (1) that an evented mechanism based on the database lifecycle of such objects is about the persistence of said objects, not about the domain.
lastly, if you think code complexity is about how fat your models are, I urge you to get out of "the rails way" for awhile and do some heavy reading. Moving code into concerns is just geography, and having lots of code in a single class is merely the most visible symptom of complexity.
The persistence is part of the domain. You need to know about when your objects are persisted and when they are not, this can be an intrinsic part of some of your business logic. Thus the events are relevant to your domain.
Of course not all your business logic needs to be aware of persistence, and nowhere do you see me arguing that all business logic should be in concerns included into the AR class.
Don't put words in my mouth, and don't assume I am stupid. You are arguing in a rather ad-hominem way, and it is diminutive to your arguments.
I can't be the first guy who's put his head through a wall upon hearing you say persistence is part of the domain. The only time persistence is domain is when your domain is the data store. "But AR is the database"—totally correct. the domain of AR is the database. But that is almost never the same as your business domain, and trying to mix the two creates a great deal of incidental complexity.
Martin Fowler's Catalog of Patterns: http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/activeRecord.html
You refactor.
In my experience, anytime you're writing something for the sake of "possible code re-use", you're wasting time. Code should and does get refactored often. By adding levels of indirection from the outset, you add a barrier to refactoring and likely additional unnecessary code.
> You obviously need to choose the patterns that fit the problem you’re trying to solve – it’s rarely one-size-fits-all, and some of these principles may be overkill in a very simple 15-minute blog application. Our objection is that Rails feels like it’s a Beginners’ Version, often suggesting that one size does fit all
This quote from the post (minus the "Beginners" jibe - sorry!) is my core objection. Your example works fine if you're working with a simple application. But the "Rails Way" feels like it starts to fall over when you get to medium or large codebases.
I feel like Rails could benefit hugely from a few core "Advanced" features that help you grow a small application into a larger, functioning business. Sure, you can add them yourself, but then you lose the advantage of shared standards and strong architectural conventions. Every new developer we hire has to learn what exactly we mean by "Interactors" or "Decorators" or "Policies".
Don't even get me started on the hand-wavy "loosely coupled".
If this is a poor example, pick a good example. I'll be happy to code ping pong you whatever example you choose.
One way to spend hundreds of thousands of LOC on an application is to stuff it with needless abstractions. That doesn't make it "advanced", and it's not Rails that's falling over, it's probably just some shitty code.
Maybe that's a clue that your chosen paradigms weren't that helpful. Or rather, that they convoluted the code base instead of clarified it. It's certainly a red herring that you need to teach your abstractions to new developers and that it's an endeavor to do so.
POROs are great, though. Our app/models is full of them. We even added app/services too. The trouble I have is with people who, like you, fall in love with the flawed notion that their application is such a special snowflake that it deserves "advanced techniques". Bullshit. There are good techniques and bad techniques. Size of the application is rarely a factor, except in ballooning the ego of the programmer.
Anyway, the invitation stands. Present any piece of real code and we can ping pong on it. I enjoy talking about specifics and improving real code. I detest "oh that was just a poor example, but the general principle is..." kind of debates. If you can't produce a good example, you don't have a general principle.
Also, I never said never. I said this particular example was a poor example and the general principle derived from it was equally poor. Garbage in, garbage out.
In this case, the Right Place (tm) to put these is in POROs / Interactors that can be tested in isolation and re-used across the code-base if necessary. This code should not live in controllers and certainly not in ActiveRecord models.
It sounds like you agree with that, since you're using them in your own codebase?
In that case, is there not an advantage to standardising the API for these POROs in Rails? Simple methods like fail!, success?, failure? and message
Another way of asking the question - why do so many Rails developers fail to realise that they can use these concepts? Why are so many Rails codebases packed full of enormous ActiveRecord models that are crippled with numerous before_save callbacks?
Sure, shitty coders write shitty code. But can't you lend them a hand?
Though I don't know if I agree that the actual sending of emails belongs in a PORO either and not a controller. It seems like determining whether or not emails need to be sent is the kind of logic I would put in a PORO and do the actual email sending from a controller method as in DHH's example.
Edit: Just saw DHH's second example, that's essentially how I would write it.
Key phrase: "if necessary".
It sounds like you're advocating for building abstractions before you actually have a reason to use them. Your reason seems to be "we may need to reuse them in the future" or, "one can see where we might move in a direction where we'd want want to re-use this code", or worse yet, "we're definitely going to build some functionality after this release when we'll want to re-use this stuff."
I've been there, really, I have. Build the abstraction when you actually need it, not when you think you're going to need it, or pretty close to needing it, etc. Because 98% of the time, YAGNI.
> In that case, is there not an advantage to standardising the API for these POROs in Rails?
Not a big enough that I've come across to warrant building domain-specific abstractions and special rules that, as @dhh mentioned, will serve only to raise the barrier to entry to your codebase.
If it sounds that way, I've over-simplified the examples in the blog post in the interests of clarity. I'll take more care in future! The specific interactor in question is used in 4 separate places.
From the post:
> You obviously need to choose the patterns that fit the problem you’re trying to solve – it’s rarely one-size-fits-all, and some of these principles may be overkill in a very simple 15-minute blog application.
It's not clear to me that adding more APIs and conventions that said shitty devs won't read about, understand, or even be aware of is actually useful.
If shitty devs are your problem, don't fix the dev tools - FIRE the tools pretending to be devs...
If you really want to standardize the interface, use the tools that already exist: ActiveModel and validations. Your “Interactors” are models; they just happen to be coordinating models that affect multiple ActiveRecord models simultaneously. (I did this for an account plan change system that affected billing and device assignment to a plan. It could easily affect a dozen or more records, all in a single transaction, but was itself easily testable.)
That's going in my quote book. Thank you DHH.
Cases have Tasks and Activities. Activities are always associated with a case, and may be associated with a task.
In the controller, when assigning a case, one would type: AssignCaseCommand.new(params).execute!
The command class implements the Command pattern (the pretty well established name for interactors) and is a Composite as well.
BTW - the same command that assigns the tasks of a case is also used to merely assign a task. And, if we're just recording an activity, we would just use the create activity command.
I think it would be insanity to try and capture the rules associated with re-assigning tasks in the controller. (I am pretty sure that you would agree.)
--Minor Edit for clarity--
I don't know how to put this gently, but this concoction looks like a hot mess with no separation between modeling and controlling.
These commands have a ton of domain logic all tangled up with activity reporting, formatting, and parameter parsing. It looks like a big ball of mud to me :(
That is of course the most popular of all architectural patterns. :)
Edit: Curious why the downvote, I ask a legitimate question to the parent to provide a source that the command pattern is the most utilized architecture in the industry so please don't downvote without an explanation.
I disagree that re-assigning a case belongs in the case model. It is a complex interaction between several models. Extracting it to a command object allows all of the rules to be easily understood.
Unfortunately, it's easy to dismiss simple examples as not being worth the complexity and demand real examples which can be dismissed because they cannot be easily understood.
When I did something similar[1], I implemented it as a “virtual” model and applied validations to make sure that the PlanChange was properly constructed, and then performed the change in a transaction. I was able to test the hell out of it both with and without actual database interaction. But I was able to use it in three different locations and removed lots of special case code that had built up over two years of development.
You probably don't need Commands. You probably need something to orchestrate manipulating multiple ActiveRecord objects simultaneously in a transaction. It's still a model, but it may not be the model that you thought it was.
[1] Account from Plan [a] to Plan [b] that has a different quota, affecting Device assignments, possibly including moving some devices to Plan [b], some devices to Plan [z] (a default plan), and disabling some devices entirely because there's no quota available anymore.
Command, Virtual Model, Verb Model, Interaction. If I were working on your team I am sure we could agree that one of those would do for a name.
I think the main problem with your command pattern approach is that you didn't implement the full command pattern. At least, I assume you didn't, you didn't actually show the controller. The command pattern has one extra class, the invoker. The invoker takes commands, and invokes them. A great example of this is the worker queue, it takes generic worker objects that have an 'execute' method.
It is never the class that creates the worker objects, that executes them. Yet that seems to be the way you're going to implement the controllers that use these commands.
What I think you've built instead is an adapter pattern. You have abstracted a class of problems in a way that they have a common interface, so that in your controllers you have a uniform way of invoking them.
This is where I think dhh sees the muddiness in your code. Why are you abstracting your interaction from the controller, which is supposed to be the exact thing that should be controlling the interaction.
The only reason for that would be that the same interaction is happening in different controllers in exactly the same way. And that's something that dhh claims does not happen in real applications, or at least he demands an example.
To address your comments:
While it is true that one of the great features (and frequent motivations) for using the Command pattern is the separation of the creation and invocation, it is not the only motivation. The two big payoffs that we are getting are:
- Separation of invocation from the knowledge of how it is carried out
- Composition of complex commands from smaller, simpler commands
There's no requirement that the invoker is never the same as the creator. It's just that most often it isn't, particularly (as you noted) in a worker queue system. That's really just a feature of the implementation that the command readily enables rather than a fundamental property of the pattern. For us, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't; that's not the primary payoff that we're going for.
I can't support the characterization of this as an Adapter. This is fundamentally behavioral. I have a class that represents an action that I want to have happen. All of the places that want this action do not need to know what is involved, they only need to create the command and hand it off/invoke it.
FWIW - I have five different places in my software that create an AssignCaseCommand. - One controller
- Three commands that can create this as a sub command
- A utility job
Plus that simple concept is available to any custom implementation code that we write.
This is, of course, a primary advantage of having a static representation of the domain-level demands of your code—you can choose many ways and many environments to execute it within. It's a function I use in real code all the time.
It includes a lot of more context than your example, so I was guessing liberally at the missing pieces. But hopefully this is still easily digestible.
The main difference I see between the Rails philosophy and most of these "Use SRP and Interactors and things!" blog posts are that Rails is way more interested in using the correct tool for the job, and most of these blog posts are of the "use this for everything and every one!" variety.
I have one project right now that I decided I wanted a Command for one action. I'm accepting input from a webhook that I can perform asynchronously, it interacts with like 5 different models, and I wanted to beat up on the tests pretty thoroughly. So I did that.
Elsewhere I'm using concerns to make like 4 different models easily sortable.
And other places I'm using Module#concerning to keep models organized.
ONE TRUE WAY is overrated. I'd rather use whatever works given the context.
You are using app/services and POROs in your own app? So are we. But I guarantee they don't look like yours because there is no endorsed convention.
Why not? Because Rails is still clinging to such an outdated idea as MVC? Pure MVC at a large scale is bullshit.
"Size of the application is rarely a factor". I don't agree. Size of the application is always a factor. A big factor.
What I'd like to see is the community embrace conventions outside the fabled "MVC" paradise. Rails is "convention over configuration", and is content to hold your hand for your first thousand lines of code... but then what?
avoiding a new layer of abstraction because it can just about be done in vanilla rails isn't a solution, it's just throwing more lines of code at the problem.
recently i've found that everything i do at the frontend intermixed with the controller, models and helpers could be made simpler with two way databinding.
it's also simpler, if someone want's to see if it looks right you can plug in some fixtures and tweaking css can be done independantly instead of needing to write something in ruby to affect how something in html looks.
maybe for a project with a large codebase is to use lighter frameworks such as backbone rather than having to do full rewrites in emberjs or angularjs. and let the code rewrite itself, ie. just clean up the portions of code that were only there for presentation.
However, there's a distinction that has to be made in your example and the OP's. In the OP, the failure of the Interactor, including the delivery of emails, would cause the controller to enter the "failure" branch:
if interactor.success?
redirect_to home_path
else
flash[:error] = interactor.message
render :new
end
if @grouper.save
ConfirmedGrouperEmails.new(@grouper).deliver
AssignBarForGrouper.enqueue(@grouper.id)
redirect_to home_path
else
render :new
end
Or maybe because the email addresses are invalid? Handle that when they are captured. It's way too late for that here.
Perhaps if someone made a post like this with starting code that was more complex it would be a better example, and also harder for you to counter it with a couple gists ;)
To my mind, this code is much clearer, which proves the OPs point.
And honestly, Rails already has something that works beautifully for an “interactor” extraction. It's called ActiveModel. Add a bit of other code (include ActiveModel::ForbiddenAttributesProtection, ActiveModel::Validations::Callbacks, and ActiveModel::SerializerSupport; extend ActiveModel::Naming) and you've got an object that acts like an ActiveRecord object but orchestrates changes across multiple models in a clean, constructive way—without introducing an entirely different way of working with your code.
I've done this at both places I've been doing Rails and it works at both cleaning up the models it orchestrates and keeping the business logic in the places where it belongs. I'm working actively to get rid of some of the Rails Fads that have come through and wreaked havoc on the current codebase (we've got Presenters and Commands and all sorts of other stuff that is just making the code harder to understand with little value).
There's a million ways to skin this particular cat, and claiming that “adult” Rails needs this particular gem or that particular way of writing code says a lot more about the person claiming it than the people who aren't following that particular fad.
The thing which Rails and DHH offer no guidance whatsoever is the separation of persistence from the domain model. The Active Record pattern is itself a conflation of those two things, so this is an opinionated choice, and I respect it as a sane default for a wide variety of applications. It works perfectly fine up to a certain scale but when the business logic reaches a certain complexity and the persistence logic reaches a certain complexity then it makes sense to separate them. A lot of proposed solutions might be overkill, but keep in mind that DHH and the company formerly known as 37signals specialize in minimalist software, so they combat this complexity from the UX down rather than conceiving architectures to support it. I agree with this philosophy insomuch as all else being equal, simpler is better, but the problem is that some applications are necessarily more complex than Basecamp, and sometimes we need more than what Rails provides out of the box. Convincing DHH of this is pointless because he doesn't have to deal with it and he has no incentive to understand anyone else's pain in this regard.
Everyone[1] needs a persistence layer and domain objects. That ActiveRecord is both ActiveModel and persistence is neither here nor there—and Rails 3 did a lot to making it possible to separate ActiveModel (domain object behaviour) and ActiveRecord (persistence layer behaviour) in a logical perspective so you can choose to persist differently than ActiveRecord does. Everyone needs some kind of controller. Everyone needs some kind of presentation layer. Aside from providing sane defaults for all of this, Rails doesn't try to dictate how your application is built.
The “more complex” architecture required for your application is unlikely to be a good fit for my application’s “more complex” architecture. For Rails to anoint one particular “more complex” architecture…is to fail anyone else who doesn’t need that architecture or would need something different. If you want to promote a particular type of architecture, there are ways: write an Engine; include generators. Give people guidance. Tell people why they want to use your particular architecture, but also tell them why they shouldn’t use it. If a lot of people need it, they will adopt it. Like Rspec. Like cucumber. Like ActiveModel::Serializers.
And, honestly, consider whether you really need your “more complex“ architecture or whether you can combat it the same way that Basecamp does. We're doing that with our product team, trying to find features we can remove and reimplement later when we really need them. Ours is a fairly mature product, so it's hard—but it's happening.
[1] For some large subset of everyone. Anyone who is reaching for something like Rails, Django, etc. needs some sort of persistence layer. Anyone who needs to store data needs that. Everyone needs domain objects.
This seems to suggest you were looking for guidance or sane defaults for this. If that's not what you intended it to mean, I'm sorry for misreading it.
I am looking for guidance (or rather good discussion and ideas) about how to address this issue for larger Rails apps, just not from Rails or DHH. I don't think it's Rails' place to do this since I don't really think a one-size-fits-all approach is right and it sort of tramples over the core philosophy of ActiveRecord which I believe is a useful default. On the other hand I don't buy into DHH's philosophy that its all astronaut architecture either.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Driven-Design-Tackling-Complexi...
The problem is that Rails ships with a very limited set of core architectural concepts, and many inexperienced Rails developers feel like they've got to cram all of their code into a Model, View or Controller.
Once your codebase reaches a certain complexity, principles from other programming paradigms are extremely useful.
So you could cram every design pattern known to man and they would still cram everything in their controller.
API's are hard to discover and it takes time through trial and errors or being teached the way things are.
method confirm_grouper () {
MyApp::Action::ConfirmGrouper->new(leader => $self)
->run
}
my $result = $member->confirm_grouper;A Service Object work, could just echo hello world every 15 seconds and still be called a Service Object, while a model in your application doing the same thing can no longer be called a Model.
The problem is that people think Rails is an architecture to begin with. Rails is just a framework that uses the MVC pattern (mangled slightly to fit the realm of HTTP). In the end, MVC is nothing but a directory structure for our files. What you put in those files and directories is up to you. Uncle Bob gave a great keynote on this called Architecture: The Lost Years. Here's a link: http://www.confreaks.com/videos/759-rubymidwest2011-keynote-...
In this way, we've successfully commoditized another differentiating factor of developers so we can ship on Internet Time(tm).
For beginners, I'm not sure it would be helpful to introduce a whole load of named patterns, as it just leads to cargo-culting and overuse of patterns without understanding whether they even apply.
It was interesting to read about a different approach though - thanks for the article.
The important metric here isn't "wc -l app/models/god.rb", it's "God.public_instance_methods.length".
There is also an argument for making models smaller by splitting some of their functionality into modules too (what you're talking about), but I think that's a weaker case - better to use concerns for shared code.
In that same vein, this may be a repeat message of a concept that is not novel, but as an experienced non-web developer who is fairly new to Rails, I learned something from reading this.
I also appreciate you pointing out what sounds like a good development resource (Domain Driven Design).
[1] http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/domain-driven-design-quickly
Ruby and Rails feel best as a prototyping platform for getting something out the door fast, proving a concept, and not worrying so much about correctness or maintenance.
I don't think if you are doing a lot of TDD and larger systems that piling on more Ruby and Rails is the right answer. I think once you know what you are working with, a well designed language with a compiler is a huge help and would remove a ton of useless tests and stuff that you end up writing in Ruby by hand.
This very likely leads to an API driven system with an API written in a strongly typed, compiled language like C#, Java, Scala, Haskell, or Go and writing your front end in whatever makes the most sense for your team.
At that point you get the benefits of a nice rapid development platform like Rails for your front end, and a fast, testable, API written in something else using all the clean code architecture you want.
The trick is, you do everything ugly in Rails or PHP or whatever in your initial prototype and you might not even write tests. You just ship working code until your prototype has proven a business case. Then, you move it towards something with lower TCO over time. Make the investment in your code when it makes sense to invest in it and use the best tool for the job at each step.
You probably never need to leave the standard Rails MVC stuff on most projects unless they are wildly successful and/your long term needs change. Even then, you can probably keep the rails front end stuff and just talk to an API and be very happy.
Having worked with the Interactor gem for a little while once you break things down into small interactors that can be used by the Organizers, I have two main complaints.
1) inputs are unclear. With calling new or some custom class method you can use descriptive variable names to say what the object expects to be present to do it's job. With the Interactor gem you end up adding in comments describing what keys need be present in the context and what keys will be added to the context so the next programmer can use the interactor you've created without having to go through and grok everything.
2) You end up having to (re)create a failure protocol to communicate with the controller and display to the user. We take the AR errors functionality for granted in our controllers/views with interactors you have to come up with a similar system.
2.5) as a result you end up writing a lot of boilerplate fail! and rollback code
2.5.2) and a non-atomic operation like notifying the payment gateway can break the whole model of rolling back and you have to end up raising so your user doesn't end up in a invalid state or get charged twice.
We've got a convention that all Interactors must be commented to specify what inputs they take.
Responds in much the same way active record does, allowing validations, errors, forms built from interaction objects, etc.
require 'active_support/concern'
require 'my_cool_concern'
class DummyClass
include MyCoolConcern
Or, perhaps, to turn this argument around, it's better to say it this way: A Concern is poorly-constructed if it cannot be tested in isolation, so therefore something like MyCoolConcern should be written with its testability (inside of DummyClass) in mind.
You've got a God class that exposes 500+ public methods, so you split it into concerns. But now you've still got a God class with 500 methods that's split across 10 files. Good luck understanding that.
Concerns are useful when they're genuinely sharing functionality between classes - not just for splitting up "Big Bags O' Methods".
Hmmm. I'd say it depends.
Of course having concerns (a fancy word for modules IMHO) shared between classes is great. But i've also found cases where separating a god class' behaviour into different concerns helped a lot. The important thing in those cases was recognizing and avoiding dependencies between different concerns, so instead of ending up with a god class split across many files of inter-dependant code (i.e. worse than before), you can end up with a "god" class split into its minimal "core" part and a couple of concerns that only depend on that core part but not between each other. Yes, you could still call that a god class, as it will have a very fat public API, but at least you can reason about what it does in terms of different concerns, so you gain something :)
I've found them genuinely useful for that - there is a lot of code for things like urls, publish status, ratings, roles, permissions etc that can be shared between models if they have similar functionality.
They're just a recognition that composition via modules is often better than inheritance.
Rails is easy to extend, people often forget that. Great post.
At MoneyBird we are using the Mutations gem to represent something like the interactors mentioned in this article. One major advantages of Mutations, is that is also does input filtering.
https://github.com/orgsync/active_interaction https://github.com/cypriss/mutations
- Built-in ActiveModel validations. - Designed to be used with form objects. - Easier and more flexible composition. - Translatable with I18n. - Quacks like an ActiveModel.
That being said, Mutations is a great library for PORO interactors and ActiveInteraction wouldn't exist without it.
0 - http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/delegate/rdoc/Si...
1 - http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/delegate/rdoc/De...
2 - http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0/libdoc/forwardable/rdoc/F...
MassivelyUpVotedPostPresenter.new(@post, self.view_context)
Or just inject the whole controller instance and you have your router helpers too!
MassivelyUpVotedPostPresenter.new(@post, self)
1) Use presenters for display-only logic to keep controllers concerned with managing requests only.
2) Using service object / custom classes in /lib for actions on models as well as abstracting any common related functionality. Creators, Updaters, Processors, Orchestrators, etc. Keep your models only concerned with data and not data transformation, and your controllers from doing it as well.
One of the future posts (coming soon!) will be on Presenters / Decorators.
I would argue these custom classes should still live in /app, rather than /lib, but I may be wrong.
I created a flowchart that illustrates this strategy: http://rails-recipes.clearcove.ca/pages/how_to_change_object...
> Here at Grouper, we’re long-time users of Ruby on Rails – along with other New York startups like RapGenius, Etsy and Kickstarter.
Etsy doesn't use Rails though, it uses PHP.
Maybe there are some "user" features (login, logout, change name) and "cart" features (add/remove item in cart).
These features would all live horizontally, be able to call each other (design your object graph wisely!) and would never be able to inspect or elaborate on implementation details!
These features may or may not talk to some database for its own persistence, but that's up to the functions.
And the features are pure functions in your language of choice. They have no knowledge of the web, or requests, they're perfectly transient. They act on a "state" object that you pass around to them, which in tests is just a blob of memory and in production is a real database or wherever else you store state.
It's simple, yet so powerful. This is how we do it, and it's scaling very nicely.
I think that the answer is clear, this should not be a part of rails since it's not true to all apps.
I think that if you want to have something real quick, you don't need an interactor/service class.
When you have a bigger app, you definitely need that, or you will get to a point where you code is split into models/observers/callbacks/lib/app/concerns and you can't find anything.
Rails generators are pretty easy to extend, this way, when you generate a new model, you can easily create the service class for it.
You can also EASILY create new generators that will generate the service classes for you with your defaults and templates and what not.
Not sure Rails is missing that, however, it is definitely a best practice that people with bigger apps should use TODAY.
The author describes different ways of refactoring fat ActiveRecord models, but most of the ideas can be used outside ActiveRecord, as "best practices".
I have been using some of the patterns described in it and I am really happy with the results. The code becomes more clearly decoupled, is easy to test and results in clean, slim models.
I wonder if he's ever worked with an app that has a complicated domain.
His comments taken from this perspective make a lot of sense. Rails was written for Basecamp.
For large apps with real complexity, the rails way falls short.
before_save can modify the state of other objects. It doesn't have to. One might use it to modify only the state of the current model. You are reaching a bit, blaming the callback, when what you are really concerned with is an awkward and potentially dangerous use of the callback.
interactor: https://github.com/collectiveidea/interactor wisper: https://github.com/krisleech/wisper
/lib is intended for non-app specific code. The halfway house before code is extracted into either a Rails PR or a separate gem.
/app/factories - for classes which create active record objects
/app/services - for classes which do something I generally don't care about the return value of. Often perfect for background jobs.
/app/decorators - most of these are Draper classes
/app/forms - form objects
/app/interactors
# add to application.rb
config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/app/interactors)* https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/3-0-stable/railties/test...
Anything that's generic and re-usable, we put in /lib. This code is normally a prime candidate for gems - only very simple code stays in /lib for very long.
http://blog.arkency.com/2014/02/rails-refactoring-the-aha-mo...
The second missing part: Ruby is Rails. Trying to learn Ruby at the same time as a modern web framework with all its moving parts? Forget it.
The third missing part: Tutorials. Okay, I haven't done a rant on this. Google rails tutorial. The first helpful result I get [2], I scroll down. The first meat is "Setting the application home page". I see this:
Blog::Application.routes.draw do
get "welcome/index"
This is even more confusing. It says you should do something like this:
get '/patients/:id', to: 'patients#show'
get '/patients/:id', to: 'patients#show', as: 'patient'
I could go on and on. I'm sure that with a few hours of pain and frustration, I would be able to figure out exactly all the oddities of Ruby syntax, or the template language, or the DSL whatever, and understand this example well enough to extend it.
But that's not the point. The point is that, because I have to spend those hours, it means that Ruby/Rails is poorly designed. In Django, by contrast, things are almost always simple and obvious.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899
'#' is the standard notation used throughout the Ruby language for instance methods.
Think of it like this:
Blog::Application.routes.draw do |implicit_self|
implicit_self.get( '/patients/:id', { to: 'patients#show', as: 'patient' } )
endWhy isn't it "call" so it can be swapped out with a lambda, or method reference without hassle?
Services should be run with call.
-- spike@etsy.com