Book Image

Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications

By : Vladimir Dementyev
4.7 (3)
Book Image

Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications

4.7 (3)
By: Vladimir Dementyev

Overview of this book

Ruby on Rails is an open-source framework for building web applications from scratch while focusing on productivity, leveraging the power of the convention-over-configuration principle, and the well-defined model-view-controller pattern, assisting the developers in building useful features. However, this initial simplicity often leads to uncontrollable complexity turning the well-structured codebase into a hardly maintainable mess. This book aims to help you keep the code maintainable while working on a Rails application. You’ll start by exploring the framework capabilities and principles, allowing you to reap the full potential of Rails. Then, you’ll tackle many common design problems by discovering useful patterns and abstraction layers. By implementing abstraction and dividing the application into manageable modules, you’ll be able to concentrate on specific parts of the app development without getting overwhelmed by the entire codebase. This strategy also encourages code reuse, simplifying the process of adding new features and enhancing the application's capabilities. Additionally, you’ll explore further steps in scaling Rails codebase, such as service extractions. By the end of this book, you’ll be a code design specialist with a deep understanding of the Rails framework principles.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1: Exploring Rails and Its Abstractions
7
Part 2: Extracting Layers from Models
11
Part 3: Essential Layers for Rails Applications
17
Index
18
Gems and Patterns

Handling User Input outside of Models

In this chapter, we’ll continue discussing abstractions related to Rails models. This time, we will talk about user-driven operations and the corresponding design patterns. First, we’ll talk about modifying operations (creating or updating models) and introduce the concept of a form object, which is an object representing a user interface form in the code base. Then, we’ll discuss how to read (or filter) data based on user-provided parameters with the help of filter objects.

You will learn how to identify functionality that can be moved to form and filter objects, so you can introduce new abstraction layers and reduce the responsibility of the existing ones (especially the model layer).

We will cover the following topics:

  • Form objects – closer to the UI, farther from persistence
  • Filter objects or user-driven query building

This chapter aims to give you practice in extracting the presentation...