Findable 0.0.1

Motivation

You're developing a Rails application that gets it's data from an unsupported source (by unsupported, I mean it's not a database, not ActiveResource capable, etc). This could be an old socket server, flat files, etc. Like a good developer, you're using Ruby classes to represent that data, like so (assuming something xml-like):

class Car
  attr_accessor :color
  attr_accessor :year
  attr_accessor :make
  attr_accessor :model

  def self.get_cars
    list_of_cars = get_from_service_and_parse
  end
end

You've wrapped all the dirty work of accessing the data store in the model, which is good. In your controllers, you can call Car.get_cars, and magically, the list of Car objects comes across. Fantastic.

But what about filtering? You could add a bunch of methods to your Car class, or add one find method that takes a hash of arguments. But doing this on several models quickly becomes a pain.

Documentation

Using Findable is easy. Simply include Findable in the class, change attr_accessor to findable_attribute for any attribute you want to be searchable, and findable_method, padding it the method to use to retrieve an array of objects. Continuing the above example:

class Car
  include Findable
  findable_attribute :color
  findable_attribute :year
  findable_attribute :make
  findable_attribute :model
  findable_data :get_cars
end

At this point, we can use find methods similar to ActiveRecord.

Car.find(:all)
Car.find(:first, :year => 2010)
Car.find_by_color("red")
Car.find_all_by_make("Porsche")

ID attributes

If you have an attribute that acts like an ID (something that would be in the URL of your RESTful rails application), simply pass true to findable_attribute:

findable_attribute :car_id, true

and now you can use

@car = Cars.find( params[:id] )