Charls Yin Blog

Before I Begin, The ActiveModel API Before I begin, there are two major elements to ActiveModel. The first is the ActiveModel API, the interface that models must adhere to in order to gain compatibility with ActionPack’s helpers. I’ll be talking more about that soon, but for now, the important thing about the ActiveModel API is that your models can become ActiveModel compliant without using a single line of Rails code.

In order to help you ensure that your models are compliant, ActiveModel comes with a module called ActiveModel::Lint that you can include into your test cases to test compliance with the API:

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class LintTest < ActiveModel::TestCase
  include ActiveModel::Lint::Tests

  class CompliantModel
    extend ActiveModel::Naming

    def to_model
      self
    end

    def valid?()      true end
    def new_record?() true end
    def destroyed?()  true end

    def errors
      obj = Object.new
      def obj.[](key)         [] end
      def obj.full_messages() [] end
      obj
    end
  end

  def setup
    @model = CompliantModel.new
  end
end

The ActiveModel::Lint::Tests provide a series of tests that are run against the @model, testing for compliance.

ActiveModel Modules

The second interesting part of ActiveModel is a series of modules provided by ActiveModel that you can use to implement common model functionality on your own Ruby objects. These modules were extracted from ActiveRecord, and are now included in ActiveRecord.

Because we’re dogfooding these modules, you can be assured that APIs you bring in to your models will remain consistent with ActiveRecord, and that they’ll continue to be maintained in future releases of Rails.

The ActiveModel comes with internationalization baked in, providing an avenue for much better community sharing around translating error messages and the like.

The Validations System

This was perhaps the most frustrating coupling in ActiveRecord, because it meant that people writing libraries for, say, CouchDB had to choose between painstakingly copying the API over, allowing inconsistencies to creep in, or just inventing a whole new API.

Validations have a few different elements.

First, declaring the validations themselves. You’ve seen the usage before in ActiveRecord:

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class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_presence_of :first_name, :last_name
end

To do the same thing for a plain old Ruby object, simply do the following:

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class Person
  include ActiveModel::Validations

  validates_presence_of :first_name, :last_name

  attr_accessor :first_name, :last_name
  def initialize(first_name, last_name)
    @first_name, @last_name = first_name, last_name
  end
end