Hello again all, Development continues apace towards the 1.2 release of the engines plugin. As I mentioned previously, I'm taking this release as an opportunity to make things simpler internally. One of the most significant chunks of code in the current public release of engines is the fixture code, and I'm toying with dropping it in 1.2. Here's the rational.
When I first put together the 'login_engine', it occured to me that people might not want to always use the same table name for their user accounts - they might want "user", or "account", or "registration" or whatever else. In order to allow these "engines" to work (and be tested) with a user-specified table name, I had to be able to load a fixture file with a fixed name into an arbitrarily-named table. Because Rails' fixtures method derives the appropriate table (and class) from the fixtures file name, it wasn't flexible enough to support this. Duane Johnson's great patch (http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/1911) solved exactly this problem, so with his permission I used essentially that exact code to support this 'flexible fixtures' requirement of the login_engine as it stood. However, it's by far the most complex piece of code in the engines plugin, and it's increasingly difficult to maintain as Rails changes and evolves. The functionality his patch provides should be in core, but we'll see if that ever actually happens. My own personal opinion about allowing developers to use the login_engine (or other plugins) with any table name has also evolved. To support this generality, the complexity of the code hugely increases (both in the engines plugin to support it, and in the engine/plugin to allow arbitrary tables to be used), basically to the point where I don't think it's worth it anymore. I'm also moving away from using fixtures anyway, towards creating the test data in code instead - but that's just me. It's important to note that I'm not talking about dropping support for fixtures in plugins; rather I'm talking about not including the patch which allows fixtures to be loaded into arbitrary tables in the engines plugin anymore. So - thoughts? Does anyone really need this functionality? -- * J * ~ _______________________________________________ engine-developers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rails-engines.org/listinfo.cgi/engine-developers-rails-engines.org
