how does one load a model with a custom name in to a controller

Question

I'm trying to access a model for global system settings. It should be loaded in almost every controller. The problem is I can't find any help on getting rails to load the dam thing.

If this helps, the model is called Config and has two columns; 'key' and 'value'

I come from a background in PHP. I remember codeigniter could load models via.

$this->load->model('a_model_name');

The controllers I'm trying to load the model in do not have the same name as the model.

Answer 1

Rails autoloads classes when it needs them. So long as the class is in a file with the same name, and it's in one of the directories Rails looks for classes in, you just use the class as if it was loaded and Rails will load it automatically

Answer 2

Presumably, if you want to load a piece of information with a particular key you could use Config.find_by_key('the_key_you_want') to get the record in question.

I'm not sure that this would be the best way to handle your configuration, but it really depends on how your system needs to work.

EDIT:

Didn't see your update to the question before I posted my answer, seems like I misunderstood what you meant. Leaving this answer here in case it's useful, Gareth's answer seems like a fair answer.

Answer 3

The problem here is actually the name of the model. Config is used by other Rails classes - see the list of reserved names on the Rails wiki

Answer 4

You can add before_filter in ApplicationController:

before_filter :load_config

...
private
def load_config
  something
end

By default all controllers in Rails inherits from ApplicationController, so all controllers will execute load_config method at the begining.

By the way I really like rails-settings gem/plugin for configuration. It is probably something that you need. And it loads data when it is needed, so you don't have to load config in each controller, but just when you need some value, then you just do:

Settings.key

and you get what you want.