Code Quietly

After a few side projects I’ve noticed that I’d use this approach for a settings object pretty often. My settings table is very basic, just two columns, name and value. The magic happens inside the Settings model.

# app/model/settings.rb
class Settings < ActiveRecord::Base
  class << self
    def setup
      return if @settings
      @settings = {}
      all.each { |s| @settings[s.name.to_sym] = s.value }
    end

    def [](key)
      setup
      @settings[key]
    end
  end
end

I gave myself a setup method that cycles through every entry in my settings table and stores them in the @settings hash. Notice I call return if @settings is defined because there’s no need in rebuilding @settings. Next, I define the [] method to make the model act like a hash. Inside the [] method I return the value @settings at the position of the provided key.

It allows me to do stuff like this:

puts Settings[:name]
puts Settings[:version]

It’s really simple, but I like it. What about you?